My, how things change. Over the last couple of years, many Wall Street analysts have been predicting “doom” for Apple, highlighted by Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdry’s classic declaration that Apple would “disappear” unless it released an iWatch within 60 days. Now it looks like Samsung, which for a while was many analysts’ golden boy, is getting the exact same treatment that Apple got in the aftermath of Steve Jobs’ passing.
9to5Google flags a couple of gloomy analyst notes published this week that paint a pretty grim picture for Samsung’s future prospects. Fitch analyst Nitin Soni, for one, says that Samsung has already lost its edge to budget smartphone brands like Xiaomi and Micromax. Soni also doesn’t think that Samsung’s newest gadgets such as smartwatches or phones with curved displays will do anything to turn things around — Samsung is apparently hosed no matter what it tries.
Bernstein Research analyst Mark Newman, meanwhile, argues that Samsung needs “a drastic change in smartphone strategy” and says that Samsung has gotten too greedy for trying to protect its margins when it should just be cranking out low-budget devices with high-end specs as Xiaomi has been doing.
“Protecting margins in the low-end is fruitless,” Newman argued while citing last quarter’s “disastrous set of results” to back up his claim.
Is Samsung in as big trouble as these analysts suggest? It definitely looks as though the company is going through a rough patch at the moment but as we’ve seen with Apple over the past couple of years, many analysts get overly excited by a couple of quarters of subpar results. While Samsung is definitely under higher pressure than it’s been in a while, counting the company out all together seems a bit premature at this point.
