Apple Shares Tumble Over 6% Even as Revenue and Profit Top Estimates

TradingKey - Apple's earnings guidance fell short of expectations, causing its stock price to plunge over 6%, risking a further decline toward the $300 milestone.

On July 30, Eastern Time, Apple ( AAPL) released its Q3 fiscal 2026 earnings report after hours, delivering a historically strong performance with both revenue and profit breaking historical records and exceeding Wall Street expectations. However, the stock price plunged sharply by 6.24%, nearly losing the $300 level intraday.

Apple stock chart, Source: TradingView

The latest financial report released by Apple shows that multiple core financial metrics exceeded market expectations, such as total revenue, net profit, and earnings per share, as detailed below:

The core factor behind the sharp drop in Apple's stock price is the slowdown in its next-quarter (Q4) guidance caused by memory price hikes and shortages. During the earnings call, CEO Tim Cook and the CFO provided a September quarter (Q4) outlook that fell short of Wall Street's expectations, projecting revenue growth of only 9% to 11%, lower than the market's expectation of 12%.

Although production demand for the iPhone 17 and MacBooks is extremely strong, severe shortages in critical chips and assembly capacity mean Apple will have "orders but no products to deliver" in the upcoming autumn new product launch season, capping next quarter's revenue growth. In addition, against the backdrop of AI servers monopolizing chip production capacity, global memory (DRAM/NAND) prices are skyrocketing, forcing Mac and iPad costs significantly higher and directly eroding future gross margins. In response, Cook bluntly described the surge in memory costs as a once-in-a-century flood.

On the eve of Apple's earnings release, a bipartisan group of US federal senators sent a letter to Cook regarding China's memory initiative, urging Apple to commit to abandoning purchases of Chinese memory. During this conference call, Cook did not directly address questions about lobbying the Trump administration to use Chinese memory, though he did offer views on the structure of the memory market and supply shortages, while emphasizing that Apple is evaluating all options. From these indications, it is apparent that Cook has not made significant progress on the memory issue at this time.

Apple's financial report shows a picture of a perfect past quarter but an upcoming period of tests, which has made profit-takers cautious. Prior to entering the earnings season, Apple's stock surged in July, with its market capitalization once briefly neared $5 trillion, even surpassing Nvidia ( NVDA) to regain the crown of the world's most valuable company. Now, flaws in the report regarding slower guidance have prompted rapid profit-taking, triggering programmatic selling pressure.

Currently, Apple's overnight trading price stands at 311.58, having broken below the first retracement support and the medium-to-short-term bull-bear line, leaving it just a step away from the 0.5 retracement level of $309.40. If bulls can find bottoming support from buying interest in the $309 to $311 range after the market opens, the stock price may consolidate sideways here. If panic selling continues at the open and the $309.40 level is lost, the price will head straight for the 0.618 golden support level of $301.14, coinciding with the $300 psychological milestone.

Apple stock chart, Source: TradingView