Apple CEO Tim Cook leaves after hosting business leaders with the US president on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on January 21, 2026.
Fabrice Coffrini | Afp | Getty Images
Apple It will report fiscal first-quarter earnings after the call on Thursday.
Here’s what Wall Street expects, according to LSEG consensus estimates:
- EPS: $2.67
- Input: $138.48 billion
Apple’s first fiscal quarter ended in December, and the company previously said it expected more people to buy iPhones during the holiday season.
The company said it expects total revenue to grow 10% to 12% in the quarter and a similar double-digit growth rate for iPhone sales. This suggests that Apple expects iPhone 17 sales to be between $136.73 billion and $139.22 billion in the first quarter.
That has led to optimism among analysts that the company will announce a hit on Thursday. Regardless, investors have been selling the stock, and it’s down about 11% since its peak on Dec. 2.
Analysts are likely to question Apple’s management about operating costs and how much the company is paying for components such as storage and memory, whose prices have skyrocketed under the influence of artificial intelligence. shortage.
All of Apple’s computers, including iPhones, Macs and iPads, use a lot of storage and memory, raising questions about how the company plans to deal with rising component costs during a key growth cycle. Chief financial officer Kevan Parekh said in October that the company was seeing a slight tailback in memory prices, but downplayed it, saying there was “nothing to consider here.”
“We do not believe the Street has factored enough margin impact into its FY26 estimates from rising storage costs,” Morgan Stanley analyst Eric Woodring wrote in a note on Monday. He has the equivalent of a buy rating and a $315 price target on the stock.
Woodring said he doesn’t expect rising memory prices to affect Apple this quarter, but that could change as the year goes on.
“We don’t believe the consensus is still adjusted for a better-than-expected iPhone 17 cycle, but at the same time, they haven’t adjusted for higher performance and/or gross margin headwinds,” Woodring wrote.
CEO of Apple Tim Cook You may also be asked about the company’s AI strategy. Earlier this month, the company announced he chose Google Company Gemini replaces some internal artificial intelligence models and runs a piece of Apple Intelligence software.
Cook may also mention the long awaited launch of Siri this year it’s “personal” and uses AI advances.
But even Apple’s AI story may run into problems with memory pricing, as Jefferies analysts noted this week that “AI remains difficult to commercialize and monetize.”
“Not only is the AI use case unclear to consumers, but rapidly rising memory prices may make AI applications difficult to justify financially over the next two years,” Jefferies analyst Edison Lee wrote Monday. It has a stock rating.
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