Dan Ives says Apple is on its way to $4T (not for the first time though)

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) will be the first company to hit a $4 trillion market cap in 2025, followed by Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), according to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives.

The research firm believes that “naysayers” of the Cupertino-based giant have overlooked its installed base of over 2 billion iOS devices with about 300 million iPhones in the window of an upgrade opportunity, its services business worth $2 trillion, and consumer artificial intelligence having to go through the company’s ecosystem.

Wedbush maintained an Outperform rating and $300 price target on the stock.

Apple (AAPL) could sell over 240 million iPhone units in 2025, fueled by an AI-driven upgrade cycle, marking possibly the highest iPhone unit sales year in the company’s history, the research firm added.

Wedbush believes that there are 100 million Chinese iPhones only in the window of an upgrade opportunity alone for 2025.

The research firm also took note of Apple’s (AAPL) iOS 18.2 update, stating that the next operating system update will kick-start a new era for the Cupertino giant.

“This will be a multi-year AI journey that will define the future for Apple with its next generation chip architecture, hardware releases, and future iPhone models built around the AI foundation that many consumers will ultimately embrace,” Wedbush said.

The $4T Mark

This is not the first time Ives, one of Wall Street’s most prominent tech analysts, has predicted a $4 trillion market cap for Apple (AAPL).

In December 2023, he forecast that Apple (AAPL) will be the first stock to hit a $4 trillion market cap by the end of 2024, citing the pace of growth and monetization, and said any iPhone government bans in China were “very containable.”

In June 2024, Ives called Apple’s (AAPL) announcements about its AI capabilities a “historical moment”, noting that they would be the catalyst for the iPhone maker to hit $4 trillion in market capitalization within a year.

Earlier in the month, Wedbush said Apple (AAPL), Nvidia (NVDA) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) were clear leaders in the AI spending race, with one of these Magnificent Seven members expected to reach the $4 trillion market cap mark in the next six to nine months.

Not Far Behind

Wedbush expects Nvidia (NVDA) to follow Apple (AAPL) in joining the $4 trillion club in 2025.

On Friday, the chip giant briefly overtook the iPhone-maker as the world’s most valuable company. Nvidia (NVDA) briefly became the most valuable company in June, before it was overtaken by Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple (AAPL).

The tech giants’ market caps have been locked in a neck-and-neck race for several months since.

No other company has benefitted more from the AI revolution like Nvidia (NVDA), as its market cap has more than tripled in less than a year. This time last year, the Jensen Huang-led dynamo firm was valued at $1 trillion.

In comparison, Apple (AAPL) reached the $3 trillion market cap milestone in July 2023. Microsoft’s (MSFT) market cap one year ago was around $2.5 trillion.

Going back to 2019, none of these companies were valued at $1 trillion. Nvidia’s (NVDA) cap at the time was only about $100 billion.