Top Apple analyst: If Apple fails to launch AI services beyond expectations, its market value may be surpassed by NVIDIA.

On Tuesday, the most knowledgeable Apple analyst, Guo Mingchi from TF International Securities, stated on X platform (formerly known as Twitter) that the previous market consensus for Apple's shipments in 2024 was 220-225 million units. It has now been revised downwards and is approaching his earlier prediction of 200 million units. If Apple fails to launch a generative AI service that exceeds market expectations this year, Nvidia's market value is likely to surpass Apple's.Guo Mingchi's latest tweet referenced a report he made over a month ago, where based on the latest supply chain survey, he mentioned that Apple has lowered its estimate for key upstream semiconductor components for 2024 shipments to around 200 million units, a 15% decrease compared to the previous year. Among the major global smartphone brands this year, Apple may experience the largest decline.Regarding the sharp drop in shipments, Guo Mingchi pointed out that Apple is facing structural challenges:The emergence of new design paradigms for high-end smartphones. These include generative AI phones and foldable phones, which are gradually becoming the preferred choice for high-end users.The continuous decline in Apple's shipments in the Chinese market. The return of Huawei and the popularity of foldable phones mentioned above are the main reasons for Apple's declining sales in China. Apple's weekly shipments in the Chinese market have seen a year-on-year decline of around 30-40%, a trend that is expected to continue.In contrast to Apple facing severe challenges, Nvidia's future looks promising. Musk recently stated that artificial intelligence computing power seems to increase by 10 times every 6 months, which is the reason for Nvidia's rising market value, which may further increase in the future.Just this Monday, Nvidia achieved a new milestone, surpassing giants like Google's parent company Alphabet and Amazon, and most recently surpassing Saudi Aramco to become the world's third-largest company, following only Microsoft and Apple in the tech industry.Although both Apple and Nvidia's stock prices fell on Tuesday, Apple's decline was significantly greater than Nvidia's. The gap in market value between the two narrowed further, currently only about $500 billion apart.