iPhone sales falter in the world's top smartphone market

Quick. Can you name the world's top market for smartphones? If you said India, you're wrong. Do you want to take another guess? The U.S.? Nope. The answer is China. And AppleInsider was able to get a look at a note written by J.P. Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee about Apple and the Chinese market written for Morgan customers.

Chatterjee analyzed the latest smartphone data disseminated by China's Academy of Information and Communications Technology and found that information covering the month of April 2022 showed 1.7 million international phone shipments were made in China that month. Most of those deliveries were iPhone models although the total number of phones delivered was 45% lower than the usual historical average of 3.1 million handsets.

During April, overall smartphone shipments in China declined 26% on a sequential basis. Following the trend, iPhone shipments in China declined 16% from March to April. In previous years, shipments of iPhone models during that same time period tended to rise by as much as 27%. Even with the decline, international phone shipments in China made up 9% of the smartphone market in the country. While that was down from 11% in March, it was still ahead of the 8% historical average.

Since last October, international phone shipments have made up 19.2% of smartphone sales in China. That is up from the 15.8% of overall Chinese smartphone sales that came from international shipments last year.

Chatterjee has a 12-month target price of $200 for Apple which he calculated by multiplying his fiscal 2023 earnings estimate of $6.73 a share by a price-earnings multiplier of 30. Apple shares closed Friday at $149.64 leaving the stock 34% away from the analyst's target price.