Apple Loses $1 Trillion in Market Value in a Year

The Apple Inc. logo at the entrance to the Apple store in Brussels on Nov. 28, 2022. (Yves Herman/Reuters)

Apple has lost $1 trillion in market value over the last year, as the tech company faces its worst decline in months.

The tech giant’s market cap dipped below $2 trillion on Jan. 3 for the first time since May 2021, one year to the day after it became the first publicly traded Silicon Valley company to be valued at $3 trillion.

Shares of Apple Inc. were down 3.7 percent, over news regarding weakening consumer demand for its products.

The sell-off wiped out $85 billion in market value for the smartphone maker.

Like the other big tech companies, Apple has been faced with supply chain difficulties and recession fears, which have taken a toll on advertiser and consumer spending.

Nikkei Asia reported on Jan. 2 that Apple was seeing weaker demand, specifically for some of its most popular devices like MacBooks, AirPods, and Apple Watch.

The company had allegedly notified several suppliers to make fewer parts for those items in the first quarter.

“Apple has alerted us to lower orders for almost all product lines actually since the quarter ending December, partly because the demand is not that strong,” a manager at an Apple supplier told Nikkei Asia.

Analysts are also concerned about the popularity of Apple’s new products and the difficulty it faced with its iPhone 14 shipments during the key holiday shopping season after pandemic-related disruptions at its main supplier in China.

Lockdowns in China Hit Apple’s Holiday Earnings

Apple said it experienced “strong demand” for iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max devices but expected lower shipments than anticipated due to the Chinese regime’s lockdown restrictions.

The company faced reduced manufacturing output from its Chinese factories, which led to a backlog in orders.

This led to significant lead times for customers to get their hands on the popular iPhone Pro models, hurting Apple’s holiday earnings last month.

Production at the world’s biggest iPhone factory, Foxconn, was disrupted in October, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) instituted pandemic lockdown restrictions, followed by massive worker protests.

Despite reports from Chinese state media that operations are now said to be running at nearly 90 percent capacity at the Foxconn plant, the delivery wait time for an iPhone 14 Pro is still about two weeks, according to Apple’s website, reported CNN.

“At the moment, the order books look good, and the orders will peak from now until a few months after Chinese New Year,” Wang Xue, the factory’s deputy general manager, told Henan Daily.

The manufacturing disruptions in China cost Apple roughly $1 billion a week in lost iPhone sales for November alone, Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives said, according to CNN.

Apple has recently accelerated plans to shift some of its production outside China.

The tech company reportedly told suppliers that it had plans to move some of its product assembly lines to countries like India and Vietnam.

“The shift out of China will not be easy and come with clear logistical, engineering, and infrastructure hurdles as the aggressive move to India and Vietnam now begins with the Apple ecosystem alerted,” wrote Ives on Dec. 4.

He said that if Apple decides to make a serious move, more than 50 percent of its global iPhone production could be transported to those two countries by the 2025/2026 fiscal year.

Big Tech Firms Suffered Heavy Losses in 2022

Although Apple’s stocks have witnessed considerable declines lately, other Big Tech firms have also faced steep losses as well.

The market share value of Amazon and Meta are down by about 50 and around 70 percent, respectively, over the past year.

Apple, meanwhile, has only lost about 30 percent of its value over the same period.

The Epoch Times has sent Apple a request for comment.