Shares of Apple suppliers crumble after lensmaker reports more than 25 percent decline in revenue
- Shares in Taiwan's Largan Precision, a leading supplier of smartphone camera lenses, plunged 9.94 percent on Thursday.
- The company had reported a 28.57 percent decline in its sales for the month of November as compared to a year earlier.
- Shares of Apple had fallen about 4.40 percent on Tuesday after HSBC downgraded the company.
Shares of Apple suppliers in Asia took a beating on the back of a Taiwanese lensmaker reporting a more than 25 percent year-on-year decline in its November revenue.
Shares of Taiwan's Largan Precision, a leading supplier of smartphone camera lenses, plunged 9.94 percent on Thursday. The company had reported a 28.57 percent decline in its sales for the month of November as compared to a year earlier.
Meanwhile, shares of contract manufacturing giant Pegatron fell 5.29 percent. The Nikkei had earlier reported that the company was preparing to shift production of its non-iPhone products affected by U.S. tariffs on Chinese exports to Indonesia in the next 6 months.
Hon Hai Precision Industry, better known as Foxconn, also declined by 3.63 percent. The contract manufacturer was also in the headlines after Reuters reported on Tuesday that it was considering an iPhone factory in Vietnam, citing Vietnamese state media.
Elsewhere in Asia, shares of Japanese electronic parts maker TDK fell 6.64 percent while component supplier Murata Manufacturing shed 5.30 percent. South Korean industry heavyweight Samsung Electronics also fell 2.29 percent while Hong Kong-listed acoustic components maker AAC Technologies declined by 5.59 percent.
"The sell-off isn't surprising, since several major Apple suppliers — including Cirrus Logic, Qorvo, and Lumentum — all recently slashed their guidance, which suggests that Apple's iPhone shipments (have) peaked," Leo Sun, a tech and consumer goods specialist at The Motley Fool, told CNBC in an email.
The Apple suppliers' declines came amid a wider rout in Asian technology companies on Thursday that followed the arrest of Huawei's CFO in Canada.
Beyond the cutting of suppliers' guidance, Sun said many questions surrounding the U.S.-China trade dispute "remain unresolved, with both sides offering conflicting versions of the agreement" that was made last weekend between the countries' leaders at the G-20 summit in Argentina.
Beyond that, he said: "The flattening (and potentially inverting) yield curve in the US bond market also strongly indicates that the economy is slowing down — which will throttle demand for chips across multiple industries."
Apple's stock was not trading on Wednesday as the U.S. stock markets were closed in honor of former president George H.W. Bush. The Cupertino-based tech giant saw its shares fall about 4.40 percent on Tuesday after HSBC downgraded the company to hold from buy and cut its 12-month price target to $200 from $205.
"Apple's iconic hardware unit growth is broadly over for now," HSBC analysts said in the note.
"Revenues are only supported by higher selling prices and by the development of services. Flat unit growth has hit Apple's share price and incidentally its key suppliers. What has made the success of Apple, a concentrated portfolio of highly desirable (and pricy) products is now facing the reality of market saturation," they said.
— Reuters and CNBC's John Melloy contributed to this report.
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