Apple is up 1.04% at $130.42 a share amid talk of an upcoming iPhone upgrade cycle.
Apple iPhone sales were down 8% in the company's 2016 fiscal year, and it has taken a beating as a result. New data from Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi Jr. and his team suggest that the next couple of years will make this period look like a blip however. The "installed base" of iPhone users is now so massive, and the annual upgrade rate so consistent, that future iPhone sales will be driven by a self-generating "supercycle."
"Our analysis indicates that iPhone's installed base will be nearly ~80% larger entering the iPhone 8 cycle than it was entering the strong iPhone 6 cycle," he wrote in a recent note to clients. The installed base of current iPhone users now stands at about 691 million phones, according to Sacconaghi. By 2018 that number is estimated to be 855 million.
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