After downgrading Apple Inc. stock a little over a year ago, Ananda Baruah, an analyst at Loop Capital Markets, is making a statement with his new buy call.
On Monday, he raised the price of Apple stock (AAPL, +1.67%), making him Wall Street’s biggest bull. Baruah’s target price of $300 is the highest on FactSet and 30% higher than the end of the trading day on Friday.
Apple stock is up 1.6% in early trading on Monday, and it looks like it will be the ninth gain in the last ten trading days. In those 10 days, the stock has gone up 11.3%.
Baruah thinks that Apple could become the “base camp” of choice when it comes to generative artificial intelligence. This kind of dominance could remind people of how Apple was able to cash in on the social media craze with the iPhone 15 years ago. Like Google, Apple used the growing interest in digital content to help its iPod business grow a lot nearly twenty years ago.
He said that the supply chain team at Loop is expecting iPhone builds and demand to go up by a lot.
“While we see everything related to ‘gen AI’ as the main driver, other factors include the possibility of a longer refresh cycle due to higher Covid demand and the release of the iPhone 17 in 2025, which will be the first iPhone on a new platform,” Baruah wrote.
Erik Woodring, a Morgan Stanley analyst, said that Apple’s stock was a top pick and raised his price target from $216 to $273.
Woodring is excited about Apple Intelligence coming out soon. He thinks it will help the company in many ways, not just by making more iPhones available.
Wall Street is most excited about how new AI features could lead to device upgrades, but these features will only be available on the iPhone 15 Pro and possibly newer models in the future. Woodring, on the other hand, thinks that iPads could also see a “mini upgrade cycle,” since less than a quarter of iPads currently in use would be able to run Apple Intelligence.
“We think there is still more room for the stock to run, as investors generally remain underweight Apple shares,” he wrote. “This is despite the recent change in investor sentiment and the outperformance that came with it.”
The price of Apple stock has gone up 36% in the last three months and is up 22% so far this year.
