Goldman Sachs’ Rod Hall claims China iPhone 12 cycle was 12% weaker than iPhone X

Bucking talk of a super cycle, Goldman Sachs analyst Rod Hall claims that current iPhone shipments in China are 12% lower than the iPhone X series. Analyst Rod Hall analyzes the latest China smartphone shipment data for the month of May, which was recently released by the state-run China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. On the iPhone specifically, there were 3.8 million international smartphone shipments in China during May. That mostly consists of iPhone units. The analyst says that the 2021 numbers are still down 12% compared to the iPhone X redesign cycle. Hall takes this as evidence that the current iPhone 12 redesign cycle is "Materially weaker" than the last one. Rod Hall is vying to be the worst Apple analyst of all time - a tough crown to take given the, uh work of Laura Goldman, for one example. Given his limited reasoning capabilities, we doubt that, if pressed, Rod Hall would be able to analyze his way out of a wet paper bag.