Tim Cook’s last earnings call comes at momentous time for Apple with stock at record

Tim Cook’s final earnings call as Apple CEO takes place the same week the iPhone maker touched a $5 trillion market cap and surpassed Nvidia as the world’s most valuable company. But there’s no time to celebrate.

Even with the stock trading at a record price and up 25% this year, topping its megacap peers, Apple is reckoning with a memory crunch and a rush for chip manufacturing capacity that’s forcing the company to lift prices on devices. Meanwhile, Apple has still yet to launch a redesigned Siri to the public, the most glaring example of how far behind the company has fallen in artificial intelligence.

With Cook set to step down on Sept. 1, and assume the role of executive chairman, the emerging challenges will land in the lap of John Ternus, a 25-year Apple veteran and its head of hardware. Ternus said little on the prior earnings call in April, which came shortly after the CEO transition was announced.

Investors are likely to ask more of Ternus on Thursday, after the company reports fiscal third-quarter results. He’ll become just the second CEO since Steve Jobs stepped down a few months before he died in 2011. Cook’s 15-year run at the top has been highlighted by a fourteen-fold increase in the company’s valuation despite its inability to launch a major hardware platform after the iPhone and its struggle to find a big market for its high-priced Vision Pro virtual reality headset released in 2024.

“Tim Cook, he’s a really talented supply chain operations guy, and I think he’s just he’s done just a remarkable job of navigating the environment,” said Melissa Otto, head of Visible Alpha research at S&P Global, in an interview. “We’ll get some visibility or some commentary at least around the current environment and how they’re navigating it.”

Last month, Apple, citing the global memory shortage, raised starting iPad and Mac prices by at least $100, with some models increasing by more than $1,000. Analysts expect iPhone price hikes this year. In the meantime, Apple announced a program on Tuesday with Klarna, a provider of buy now, pay later loans, that will allow customers in the U.S. to lease an iPhone for up to two years at a price starting at $17.99 per month.

The price increases of up to 20% on some devices were announced just before the end of the quarter, so their impact won’t be felt until the current period. For the quarter ended in June, analysts expect to see a total revenue increase of about 16%, with that growth number slipping to 12% in the current period.

More important to investors is what higher prices will do to demand in the December quarter, Apple’s biggest of the year.

Counterpoint Research sees total smartphone shipments falling nearly 14% this year, the steepest decline since 2013. The part of the market at greatest risk is the lower end, where manufacturers have less room to pass on skyrocketing memory costs. That largely means Android phones.

Apple could signal “market share gains given pricing increases at competitors,” wrote Goldman Sachs analysts, who have a buy rating on the stock, in a note this week.

Apple has yet to raise prices or change iPhone forecasts even after its June warning, though some analysts are altering their models. The hikes could actually boost earnings, some analysts say, due to the company’s renowned brand.

“We continue to believe that Apple fundamentals are very strong, with myriad price hikes likely to drive upside to revenue and EPS over the next 6-18 months,” analysts at Morgan Stanley wrote in a note last week. The firm recommends buying the stock, but they slashed their Mac forecast for the September quarter by 8% because of supply challenges.

The memory shortage is the biggest near-term challenge facing Apple, but the more significant risk to its business over the longer term likely has to do with its AI strategy.

Instead of spending heavily on AI infrastructure to build or serve advanced models, Apple is licensing much of its AI technology from Google as well as using its cloud. While the hyperscalers are all shelling out well over $100 billion in capital expenditures this year, and some are likely to exceed $200 billion, analysts expect Apple to spend just more than $11 billion, with $3.4 billion coming in the latest quarter, according to FactSet.

“While Apple was initially bruised by many investors for not joining the LLM investment cycle, investors are coming around to Apple’s industry-leading” free cash flow, analysts at Baird wrote this month. They recommend buying the stock.

Before Google, Apple’s main AI partner was OpenAI, whose ChatGPT was integrated into Siri and other parts of the operating system. That partnership has nearly fallen apart, and Apple sued OpenAI on July 10, alleging trade secret theft. OpenAI refuted the claim.

Apple needs its redesigned Siri, which was released in beta in June and is expected to launch this fall alongside new iPhones, to catch on with the public. It then needs to follow that release up with more AI features to keep pace in an industry that’s moving at warp speed.

With Ternus taking over, the company may be gearing up for more aggressive AI investing. Under Cook, the company threw off so much cash that it bought back more than $1 trillion in stock during his tenure.

In its last earnings report, Apple made a slight change to its stated policy of how it handles cash. Rather than sticking to a goal it’s had since 2018 of being “net cash neutral,” or getting its cash on hand equal to total debt, Apple said it will assess its cash and debt independently, which could free up funds for AI.

“We invest in the business first and foremost and then look to kind of return excess cash to shareholders,” Apple CFO Kevan Parekh said on the April call.

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