JPMorgan Waiting To See How Alphabet Can Compete With Apple In Consumer Products

• While Apple Inc. AAPL shares have lost 5 percent since January 26, shares of Alphabet Inc GOOGL have gained 3 percent.
• JPMorgan’s Rod Hall maintained an Overweight rating for Apple, with a price target of $141.

Google announced Q4 capex of $2,100m, representing a 41 percent y/y decline and missing the JP Morgan estimate by 31 percent and the consensus expectation by 21 percent. Google added, however, that it expects to see accelerated investment in capex in 2016 in areas including cloud, fiber and consumer products and services.

While Google had not been made “much headway” against Apple in the marketplace, it would be interesting to observe what Google may be planning to do on the consumer products side, Hall mentioned. He added, “Note that we believe that Google paused data center spend in late 2015 in part to wait for 100G networking technology on Broadcom’s Tomahawk chipset.”