Our firm bought Apple
Here are key reasons why we sold our entire Apple stake just last week:
The iPhone, though indispensable, is a mature product. Since introduction of the iPhone X, as been raising prices on iPhones. For instance, last quarter iPhone sales jumped 24% despite the number of iPhones sold not changing — all growth came from higher iPhone prices. Smartphone penetration is high globally, and thus most of the growth currently comes from replacement phones. Higher prices and lack of significant incremental improvements will likely lead to elongation of the replacement cycle from two years to three (or possibly four).
Recently Apple announced that it will stop disclosing iPhone and iPad shipments. There is only one way to read this news: The iPhone is a mature, middle-aged product with a wife and two kids. Apple’s management is desperately trying to create the narrative that it is becoming a service company. The second line of Apple’s quarterly press release says, “Services Revenue of $10 Billion Reaches New All-Time High.” Apple is trying to monetize its enormous installed base of iPhones, iPads, and Macs by selling digital goods and services to their owners.
This is where we lost optimism further. Apple has done a good job of selling digital goods (apps, movies, music, space) in its digital store, but so far it has proved to be a lousy services company. Its iCloud (email, calendar, data storage) and Apple Maps have been either outright failures or much-inferior products. Apple’s email (originally known as MobileMe) and iCloud data-storage service were basically rendered irrelevant by Google’s Gmail and Google Drive (and Dropbox
In addition to Google, Apple competes in services with another giant, Amazon.com
Then there is Siri. In the beginning it was the smartest digital voice assistant, but not anymore. Not to be disrespectful to Siri, but its IQ has been dropping rapidly in comparison to Amazon’s and Google’s assistants. Google and Amazon opened the APIs (application programming interfaces) of their digital voice assistants to other developers, and soon every appliance in your house will be responding to “Hey Google” and “Alexa.”
There are several reasons why Apple has done so poorly in services. First, it’s a product company. Macs, iPhones, and iPads are incredibly complex devices that, though they are packed with software, are released every year or every few years. Services are software — they almost require gradual, even daily improvement. You release an imperfect product and then keep improving it with continual releases. This approach seems to go against Apple’s DNA.
The second and even more important point is that Apple is facing innovator’s dilemma: Today two-thirds of Apple revenues come from the iPhone, and for that beast to survive it requires a walled garden. This is why Apple’s music doesn’t work on Amazon’s or Google’s speakers. Oh, and what about Apple’s speakers? Apple predictably took a “premium” strategy with its speakers, a strategy that worked great with Macs, iPhones, and iPads. However, the strategy has failed in the case of speakers because Apple’s product is several times more expensive than the “good enough” offerings from Google and Amazon. Moreover, the walled-garden strategy has backfired here. For instance, Apple speakers will not play Spotify
As shareholders, we became concerned about future sales of the iPhone and not highly confident that Apple’s service strategy will bear fruit, and herein lies the biggest problem for Apple: It needs a new huge product category. (The Apple Watch was a mildly successful product, but in the context of $265 billion of sales, it was a rounding error.) A car was supposed to be that category — it’s the largest product category globally — but, according to the New York Times, Apple has changed its car strategy several times and has basically given up on that category.
When Apple stock was lower, we did not have to worry as much about slower growth, but now we do — so we got out.
So, how does one invest in this overvalued market? Our strategy is spelled out in this fairly in-depth article.
Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at Investment Management Associates, which is anything but your average investment firm. (Seriously, take a look.)
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Vitaliy Katsenelson
Vitaliy is Chief Investment Officer at Investment Management Associates, Inc (IMA), a value investment firm based in Denver, Colorado. Vitaliy joined IMA in 1997. He received both his bachelor of science and master of science degrees in finance from the University of Colorado at Denver.
He is the author of two books, and his articles have appeared in Barron’s, The Financial Times, and Business Week, among others. Vitaliy has been a guest on CNBC, Fox Business, BNN and Yahoo! Finance.
He also writes a monthly column for Institutional Investor magazine and speaks to investor organizations in the U.S. and abroad. Vitaliy has close to 20 years of investment experience and has taught a graduate investment class at the University of Colorado at Denver.
Vitaliy is a CFA Charter Holder and has served on the board of the CFA Society of Colorado. Forbes Magazine called him “The new Benjamin Graham“. You can read more of his writing at Contrarian Edge.
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