Jefferies downgrades Apple to Underperform, sets price target well below current trading price

Apple has a $3.82 trillion market cap and a stock price hovering around $257. Jefferies thinks fair value is closer to $205. That gap tells you everything about why this downgrade landed with a thud on October 3, 2025. Jefferies analyst Edison Lee moved Apple from Hold to Underperform, one of the more pointed calls you can make on the world’s most valuable company. The new price target of $205.16, nudged down from a prior $205.82, implies roughly 20% downside from where shares were trading at the time of the call. The foldable problem The core of Lee’s argument is not that Apple is a bad company. It’s that the stock is pricing in a version of Apple’s future that may not exist. Jefferies estimates the iPhone 18 Fold will sell approximately 12.5 million units annually. The current stock price, by the firm’s math, implies more than double that volume. When a stock price requires something to sell twice as well as your best estimate, that’s a problem worth flagging. Lee also flagged a planned price increase of roughly $100 on higher-end iPhone 18 models. iPhone growth projections: modest, then negative Jefferies updated its iPhone unit sales forecasts alongside the rating change. The f...