Sell Apple stock before it sinks another 30%, analyst says

In the report, MoffettNathanson Research cited a combination of geopolitical shifts, increased production costs due to tariffs, and the rising probability of a recession as weighing on Apple stock.

The firm said the worst-case scenario for Apple was, at least temporarily, taken off the table when the Trump administration exempted products including smartphones from its China tariffs earlier this month.

“But Apple is nowhere near out of the woods,” the report notes. “As the Administration made clear, Apple imports from China will still bear 20% tariffs, a level that would have been unimaginable just a month ago.”

The analysts are trimming their estimate, and lowering their Apple stock price target, from $184 per share to $141. They also are keeping their “Sell” rating in place.

Apple stock rose about 2% on Tuesday to about $198 per share. The stock is down almost 19% so far this year.

MoffettNathanson noted the thicket of issues that Apple has to navigate regarding tariffs — and that the company is caught in the middle because of China’s importance in the global electronics supply chain.

“Paying a fortune in tariffs or paying a fortune in rearchitecting supply chains only to finish with much higher costs is a lose-lose choice,” the analysts said. “Moving production to the U.S. for an ecosystem that employs as many as three million people in China at wage rates as low as $3 per hour is self-evidently a non-starter.”

While Apple has shifted some production to nearby India, the analysts said that isn’t a panacea. India has sufficient capacity to meet as much as half of U.S. demand for iPhones, their report said, but while the phones are generally being assembled in India, the parts are still from China. That raises the question of whether the phones would be subjected to Indian or Chinese tariff rates or some costly combination of both.

Even putting the tariffs aside, the researchers found plenty of reasons to worry about Apple, citing that they are behind other competitors in the AI space. And some seemingly tangential issues aren’t so tangential after all. For instance, the remedy phase of the Google $GOOGL (GOOGL) search monopoly case begins this month. The report noted that the royalties Apple collects from Google account for more than a quarter of Apple’s operating income, and the judge overseeing the case has already deemed those payments to be illegal, a premise the Trump administration is not challenging.

Plus, the report noted, there just isn’t much on the horizon to get excited about. A foldable iPhone would create buzz, but that was probably something that would be showcased at next year’s Worldwide Developer Conference at the earliest, even before tariffs. With the current tariff threats, they said, that now seems “unimaginable.”