Shares of Apple have risen about 13% since the new launches on September 9, in a remarkable turnaround that pushed the stock into positive territory for the first time this year.
“The iPhone accounts for more than half of Apple’s profits and revenue and the more phones they can get into people’s hands, the more they can drive people into their ecosystem,” Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer of Northlight Asset Management, said ahead of the milestone.
Apple shares struggled earlier this year on concerns about fierce competition in China and uncertainties about how the company would deal with high U.S. tariffs on Asian economies such as China and India, its main manufacturing hubs.
The latest smartphones, including the iPhone 17 series and the iPhone Air, have lured customers from Beijing back to Moscow within the first few weeks of launch, as the company has swallowed the high cost of tariffs.
Analysts said the iPhone Air’s sleek design could fend off rivals such as Samsung Electronics, while early sales of the iPhone 17 in the US and China outperformed its predecessor by 14%, data from research firm Counterpoint showed. Brokerage Evercore ISI expects strong demand for Apple’s latest iPhones will help the company beat market expectations for the three-month period ending in September and provide optimistic forecasts for the quarter ending in December. Apple is the third company to reach the $4 trillion mark after Nvidia and Microsoft. Nvidia currently tops the rankings with a market value of over $4.5 trillion.
Apple’s cautious approach to AI had fueled fears that the company could miss out on the industry’s biggest growth catalyst in decades. Recent reports also indicate that the company is losing some of its senior artificial intelligence executives to Meta.
The company has been slow to roll out its Apple Intelligence suite, including a ChatGPT integration, while an AI upgrade to its voice assistant Siri has been postponed until next year.
According to reports, Apple has explored several partnerships with Alphabet’s Gemini AI, Anthropic and OpenAI.
“The lack of a well-understood AI strategy is clearly one of the things that is beyond the stock price. If they could figure out how to integrate AI in a way that will excite consumers and the market, you would see a very different company,” Zaccarelli said.
Apple reported its strongest quarterly results in years in the April-June period, with double-digit growth in key segments, and forecasts beat analyst expectations. The company is expected to report fourth-quarter results on October 30.
The iPhone maker’s shares trade at 33.2 times expected earnings for the next 12 months, higher than the Nasdaq 100’s 27.42, according to data compiled by LSEG.
Apple shares are up more than 7% this year, well below the tech-heavy Nasdaq’s gain of about 22%.
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