Should you buy Apple stock or has the company run out of growth opportunities? What is my price prediction for Apple in the next years? Read until the end as I reveal my price target for Apple and also what I think will happen in the next couple of days, weeks & months!

Hello everyone! So, let’s go over some of the latest news on Apple before moving on to some fundamental and technical analysis, predictions and my price target for the stock in the next years.

So, let’s start with the news that Apple will cut the App Store commission in half for small app developers starting in the next days, this will affect developers who earn less than $1M annually from the App Store Sales. This is likely to lead to a small decline in commission revenues for Apple as around 98% of the app developers will qualify for this tax reduction from 30% to 15%, but all these small developers only contribute to about 5% of the estimated $50B in annual revenues from the App Store, so that would be only a $1.25B loss for the company, that is less than half a % of the company’s total net sales in the last fiscal year.

Also, these changes may lead to a potential long-term revenue boost, as it is likely this will lead to an increasing creation of apps which will generate more commissions in return.

Alongside this we also saw the company releasing the new MacBook’s with their first in-house chip, which promises faster video and imaging processing times, with both CPU and GPU performance up to 2 times faster than the latest PC laptop chip using just a fraction of the power consumption, with both of the macbooks promising big improvements in battery life. Apple is also expected to roll out even more in-house chips in future products, as they have started the 2-year breakup with Intel chips.

We also saw Morgan Stanley upgrading their base case to $191 at the end of November, as they have cited record lead times, supply chain forecasts and carriers demand as they expect that the company will sell around 270M iPhone in fiscal year 2021, that’s 50M more than the consensus and almost 30M more than the previous estimate of Morgan Stanley, with an average selling price of 842$, 9% more than the base case, as people tend to chose the more expensive and high tech versions of the lineup in this new 5G cycle.

The 5G super-cycle, which I believe is on the way, and will continue in the next years, as 5G become more available worldwide, could still be the biggest thing coming right away for the company with 5G smartphones expected to surpass 4G sales by 2024, with the average sale price of the 5G phones also coming down, helping them become more popular. This will also be helped by the recent entry to the Indian market, as India will probably become the world biggest country in the next decade, this could be a huge opportunity for Apple to start and take away market-share from their competitors like Samsung and Xiaomi which have the biggest market shares right now.

They also released an update iPad Pro and an all-new iPad Air in September which will also boost sales in this work-from-home environment that will keep the demand very high for this kind of products, just like the Macs. Alongside the increasing demand from the Wearables, Home & Accessories that include Air Pods, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and many more products.

But the biggest reasons I believe Apple is poised for continued growth, is primarily due to its services business, as they start to offer more and more services like the Apple ONE BUNDLE, which include up to 6 services from (Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, the new Apple Fitness+ and the iCloud service) for a pretty reasonable price in my opinion starting from 15$ up to 30$/month, this could be a great option for families and even individuals who use their services a lot.

The latest services, Fitness+ just launched in the past days, and is a direct competitor to the likes of Peloton, as the service is available on the iPhone, iPad or even Apple TV. This also makes consumers buy the Apple Watch which syncs to the other devices to show you different information. The Fitness+ app just on its own is 8$/month or 80$/year which is less expensive than Peloton subscription which charges 13$ or even traditional gyms like Planet Fitness at 10$/month.

I think this will be the fastest growing sector for the company, as this aligns with the new macro trends, as the world is moving more and more to a digital approach to almost everything as consumer preferences, with more & more younger people reaching the point in life when they use these services start to align to this increasing digital approach.

We also shouldn’t forget the Apple Card & Apple Pay service among many others which also seem to gain from the move to digital & contactless payments, as this has been accelerated due to the current situation in the past year.

And one last piece of news, and the most recent one, is that Apple may have fast-tracked the Titan project. The Titan project is targeting a 2024 or 2025 push to develop an electric vehicle with advanced battery technologies, that will deliver significant increases in range at much lower costs than the current technologies while also offering self-driving capabilities.

It’s reported they will not use the same technology as Tesla Full-Self-Driving feature, but will use LIDAR sensors, similar to those that we can find in the latest iPhone 12 PRO.

I think Apple can go 2 ways with this project, they can either use the huge amount of cash the company has to buy another car-maker like Ford, GM or any other car manufacturer expect Tesla and Toyota which do have a big market cap, so that they can fast-track the potential manufacturing of cars, or they can enter into a partnership with big companies like Tesla, Volkswagen or any other car marker to either produce cars or license their technology to this other car-makers which would ultimately and probably have higher margin-returns than the effective manufacturing of cars. Apple’s current overall gross margins stand at 38% vs the 15% average of the world top 10 automakers by market cap, which is significantly lower.

But this Apple Car thing is so far out, and there are so many unknowns, I will not try to predict anything related to this until there is more clarity on the subject.

And last, before moving on to some predictions, here are some of the highlights that we heard from the latest investors conference meeting, as the CEO, Tim Cook expressed optimism ahead with the launch of many new products and services, especially the Home Pod Mini and the new 5G iPhones, as these new iPhones include new LIDAR scanners that greatly improve the camera capabilities, as the iPhone as seen very positive reviews. We also saw the Senior VP and CFO, Luca Maestri give us great outlook for the company as they expect the installed devices base to continue to growth despite already being at an all-time high as they have over 585M paid subscriptions on their platforms and expect this to surpass 600M by the end of 2020.

I also researched and found what products we can see in the near future, with the first half of 2021 bringing new iMacs, the AirPods3 and the iPad Pro, while in the FALL event we will probably get the new iPhone 13 alongside the iPhone SE PLUS and the Watch Series 7 with more products coming later in 2021 or that don’t have an estimated release date like the Air Pods Pro, the Air Tags and the iPad Mini 6.

So, before even starting, you should know that I am bull on Apple but I am willing to hear other opinions so don’t be afraid to leave a comment down below.

I have made some predictions based on the growth rate of the company, the latest plans announced by them and used some estimates. So, keep in mind this are only projections and are calculated by myself, this is not an investment advice and you should do your own research.

This are my 2025 projections for Apple, let’s take a closer look at them, each on their own.

So, in term of revenues, Apple has 5 big sources of income, which saw an overall increase of 6% despite lagging sales in the iPhone. The biggest revenue is by far the iPhone right now with over $137B in revenue in the fiscal year ending in September. I expect to see the iPhone sales increasing in the next years, especially in 2021, with the new 5G iPhone creating a super-cycle for the company, as most iPhone users, including myself here, as I will upgrade from my iPhone X, will switch to this new product. The iPhone sales have decreased in the last couple of years by 14% and 3% as a result of the product not having big improvements, as well as iPhone usually starting to last longer than previous models, so I expect to see a 12% increase in sales next year and a gradual decrease in the growth of sales as more people upgrade, ending with just a 5% growth in iPhone sales in 2025.

The next revenues stream is from the Mac, which has seen an increase in the past 2years, with revenues topping $28B this year after the huge demand from the work from home consumers. I expect this trend to continue as they plan to continue to launch better products and I can see the company having a similar growth next year before starting to decline slightly until 2025, also ending with a 5% growth.

The iPad is currently the smallest revenue stream for Apple but has also seen an increase in demand in the past 2 years with a 13% average increase in revenues. I also expect the iPad to continue to grow in the next couple of years, especially with the learn-from-home environment for kids, and even after this period ends, the transformation for learning will implicate more digital usage. I expect the iPad to see some similar growth to the Macs, especially with the latest generation also bringing a new iPad air to the market.

The 4th revenue stream and the fastest growing in the past 2 years, with an average growth of 33% are the wearables, home & accessories revenues. This have topped $30B this year, as Apple has also just launched the Apple Watch series 6 and also feature other great products like Apple TV, the Air Pods the Home Pod and the Home Pod mini alongside other third-party accessories.

I gave this revenue stream a growth of 20% starting next year with a gradual decrease to around 8% by 2025, as I believe this will become more & more popular as they start to offer more vertical integration.

And last, but by no means least, the revenue stream that I expect to grow the most and the fastest is the revenue from the services that Apple offers. This includes revenues from Apple Care, Advertising, Cloud Services, Payment Services like Apple Card & Apple Pay and of course the digital content which includes fees from the App Store alongside subscription-based income including the new Apple One Bundle and Apple Fitness+ alongside the already know Apple Arcade, Apple Music, Apple News+, Apple TV+ and hopefully I don’t forget any others.

So, I expect this to become the clear 2nd biggest revenue stream for Apple by 2025, as I expect this to grow more than 20% next year, mainly due to the Apple One Bundle and Apple Fitness+ followed up by a slightly decreasing growth, ending with a 10% increase in revenues in 2025.

I think this are fairly conservative base case scenarios for the revenues, as I expect them to continue to increase the other revenue streams and not have such a large percentage of the revenues coming from the iPhone sales as you can see in this chart.

In terms of expenses, I pretty much kept the same margins as in previous years, with a 68% expense ratio on product sales [ iPhone / iPad / Mac / WHA ] and 35% expense ratio on SERVICES, as this are way more lucrative.

In the past 3 years, the products gross margin was 32.7%, so I actually imply bigger expenses for the manufacturing and sales of products, as this is mostly impacted by the company’s supplier’s ability to make up for and demand, while for the services revenue, the gross margins for the last 3 years has been 63.5% on average, but I expect this to be more in-line with the 66% margin in this past year. So, if services manage to grow to about half the revenues from the iPhone, this will effectively double the gross revenues, as every buck gained in the service revenues account for 2$ in the product sales.

So, I expect the total revenues for Apple to increase from $274B in 2020 to over $440B by 2025, increasing by approximately 10%/year, while I will keep the expense ratio pretty much in-line and have them increasing by 11%/year, this would bring the total gross income for Apple to $177B, increasing mainly due to the services revenues as I said earlier. This growth is just above the 4year average, and below the 2018 levels, which we might see again with this 5G super-cycle and explosive growth in the services revenue.

I also think the company will continue to invest in both Capital Expenditure and Operating expenses.

I think the operating expenses will remain pretty much in line with the previous years, as this number has increased by 1% annually both in R&D and SG&A. So, I will keep the exact percentages from previous years, as I expect the revenue to increase, thus I don’t see a big increase percentage wise. This would account for over $60B in operating expenses by 2025 and over $11B in Capital Expenditures by 2025, as I expect this to increase, mainly due to the possible EV developments or investments in self-driving capabilities alongside other manufacturing capabilities. You can see that the Capex spending has been decreasing in the past years with just over $8.8B in payments for business acquisitions and the other traditional Capex spending. Some people may use the cash generated by investing activities as Capex, but that is more unreliable. I also can see the Capex going back up, so I wanted to be safe and implied a 10% growth.

This money would account for over $73B in expenses and would bring the profit for the company to almost $104B before interest and taxes.

Moving on, let’s see what interest income and expenses the company has had in the past few years. We can see a decrease in interest expense in the past few years as the company has been paying off debt, but they have also been generating less money in this department, with an overall decrease in this department of more than 50% in the past year, way less than the amount from 2018. So, for safety reasons, I used a 10% decline in both income and expenses related to interest, while increasing the other losses by 10%/year.

This would bring the company pre-tax income to just over $104B in 2025.

Let’s move on to taxes. I know the Federal income tax rate is 21% for the company, but the actual effective tax rate for the company was lower than 15% in the past year, mainly due to lower tax-rates on foreign earnings alongside tax-benefits and tax-settlements. The average effective tax rate has been just over 16% in the past 3 years, but with more and more of the revenues coming from outside the US, I think it’s safe to say that the company will have around a 15% effective tax rate by 2025, this obviously if nothing major changes in tax policy around the world.

So, Apple would have $88.6B in income after tax by 2025 and with the current outstanding shares standing at just under 17B, so I don’t even account for the company probably continuing to do share buybacks, this would mean a $5.22 future earnings/share. And with today’s price for Apple just around 136$, that would mean to company is trading at just over 26 times forward price to earnings.

I don’t think Apple will ever trade at a discount again, with the current PE standing at over 40, I believe this will eventually go down, probably to around 35, despite the increase in services revenue, which is highly valued by investors. I think we can see Apple trade somewhere near 35 times P/E in 2025, especially if something big happens with the EV project, this could be even higher, just look at Tesla which trades at insane P/E. Of course, we also have to take into consideration the dividends that will be received from owning the stock, as Apple has started to pay dividends almost a decade ago and has 9 years of dividend growth, with a 10% annual rate of growth in the past 5 years. Here is the dividend growth history for the company, as I also went conservative on this estimate and implied a 7% growth for the next 2 years, 6% for 2023 and 2024 and just 5% in 2025.

So here are my 3 price targets for the company, including dividends but not reinvested. My bear case scenario is that Apple will trade at almost 165$ which implies a return of over 21% by 2025, while my base case scenario would see Apple trading at 195$ with a return of capital of 43%. I will also make the bull case for Apple trading at 225$ by 2025 with dividends included, which would imply just over 65% in gains by then.

I think this is possible as Apple has also continued to buy back shares of the company on a constant basis, as they continue to an impressive campaign with over $72B worth of common stock repurchased in 2020. They continue to buy back shares at a very fast pace, having repurchased over 1.3B shares in 2019 and 2018, while also issuing less stock every year.

So here is the full spreadsheet that I have projected for Apple by 2025 and the breakdown of everything i estimated [ 1 / 2 ] , if you do have another opinion or a suggestion please leave a comment down below, I think I have been conservative in most of my projections, but feel free to give your opinion.

Keep in mind, these targets might sound ridiculous, but just look at the growth Apple has had in the last 5years. The company has increased in value by more 400% in just the past 5years and is over 100.000% up since it started trading. So yes, the valuation is mad right now for the company. So, are you willing to bet against Apple?

The company also has pristine financials, with more than $65B in total assets compared to total liabilities, and more than $38B in cash and cash equivalents.

So, what do I expect in the next couple of days, weeks and months for Apple?

Let’s look at this CHART, so starting with the stock split, Apple saw a correction within the September stock market pullback, in a buy the news & sell the event, after a huge runup post-announcement of the stock split. The stock entered a consolidation period, and didn’t have any big catalysts, especially with new iPhone lineup not being included in the Q4 results due to the late launch. The stock found some levels of resistance near the $120 levels that it struggled to get past but acted also as support after breaking them just before the recent news of the possible EV developments or self-driving-features to be licensed to other car manufacturers. After that news the stock spiked and has now reached the previous highs made before the stock split and is facing some resistance, if the stock pushes over $140 I think we can officially say that it broke the resistance at those levels and is not just a fake-out. But I think it’s likely that the stock will consolidate between 122 and 135$ in the next weeks until the next iPhone sales and quarterly results are released, as the stock has entered overbought territory again with an RSI over 70, the first time since the stock split.

So, what would I do? Well, I own Apple stock, and I really believe this company will remain the biggest or one of the biggest in the future, so I would really add on any weakness that the stock shows before the next quarter earnings are released, as typically Q1 earnings are the best for the company due to increased holiday sales combined with the launch of new products. I think any entry below 130$ would be really nice to start and build a position or increase it if you already own the stock. As I believe Apple is one of the most stable stocks out there with large institutional holders like Vanguard, BlackRock and Berkshire owning over 900M shares each.

Thank you everyone for reading! Hope you enjoyed the content! Be sure to leave a comment down below with your opinion on the stock market!

Have a great day and see you next time!