Latest Smartphone, PC Data Could Be Bullish for These Three Holdings
We expect more findings about the tech sector in the coming days, which could add further support.
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Beginning the first full week of trading for 2025, we have multiple data points and developments for the tech sector that touch on several Portfolio holdings.
Many of them are bullish for our shares of Qualcomm QCOM and Universal Display OLED, and when we read between the lines, we see signs Apple AAPL picked up smartphone market share during the December quarter.
2024 Smartphone Sales
Counterpoint Research, one of several firms to track smartphone shipments, shared its findings that global smartphone volumes rose 4% in 2024, making it the first up year in the last three.
When we parse these figures, we want to be mindful of context like that, as well as the implied performance of the December quarter. For example, while Counterpoint’s findings show Apple’s share of the smartphone market fell to 18% for 2024, viewed against the 16.3% share figure it had for the first nine months of 2024, Apple picked up share during the final quarter of the year.
The coming days will bring other perspectives on smartphone shipments in the December quarter and full-year smartphone shipments, including those from IDC and Canalys. While the end figures may differ, as they tend to do, they should confirm that 2024 was a better year for smartphone shipments compared to the last few. That will make those data points positive for the shares of Qualcomm and Universal Display that we own in the Portfolio.
December Quarter PC Shipments
According to the latest Canalys data, the PC market achieved its fifth-consecutive quarter of growth in Q4, with total shipments of desktops, notebooks and workstations rising by 4.4% to 67.4 million units.
That was a quicker pace than the balance of the year, something we can surmise based on PC market shipments rising by 3.6% in 2024. For 2025, Canalys sees the rebound in the PC market continuing in part as businesses prepare for the end of Windows 10, and for wider refresh efforts as more AI-PC models hit the market. Canalys sees AI-PCs accounting for 35% of the PC market this year, up from around 20% this year. It’s this outlook that helps support our stance on Qualcomm shares, as it enacts its diversification strategy into this market but also others in the IoT space as well as automotive.
We will want to keep tabs on AI-PC models coming to market in the next few months, especially from Lenovo and HP HPQ. Combined, they account for 45% of the PC market, and if we lump Dell DELL into that group, it bumps the percentage to 60%.
All three have already announced new models tapping Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset, and we should see more in the coming months. We’d also point out we are starting to see more organic light-emitting touch screen notebook PC models, including ones from Dell, Lenovo and Asus. This gives us another reason to closely track developments in the PC space when it comes to revenue diversification opportunities for our holdings.
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At the time of publication, TheStreet Pro Portfolio was long QCOM, OLED and AAPL.
