British multinational bank and financial services Barclays said that the Apple Inc’s (AAPL.O) offer to replace flagging iPhone batteries from $79 to $29 could be a stumbling block for the company’s sales in 2018 following the report that company intentionally slowed down older iPhones and weakened batteries to prevent the handset from shutting off abruptly.
Barclays said it may affect iPhone unit sales if most of them would decide to take the battery replacement offer instead of upgrading their iPhones to the updated ones.
“While this is a good PR move for Apple to resolve the issue, we are concerned it could be a mild headwind for iPhone unit sales if more iPhone users decide to take the offer instead of upgrading to a new device,” Barclays said.
Barclays’ analyst Mark Moskowitz said that around 16 million sales of Apple could be at risk.
“In our base case scenario, 10% of those 519M users take the $29 offer, and around 30% of them decide not to buy a new iPhone this year. This means around 16M iPhone sales could be at risk, creating ~4% downside to our current revenue estimate for C2018,” it added.
The tech giant has earlier released an apology to those users who experiences the glitches and announced the company’s offer of slashing out prices of out-of-warranty replacement batteries for iPhone 6 or older models.
“We’ve been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhones with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize. There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, so we would like to clarify and let you know about some changes we’re making,” Apple earlier said in a statement.
Aside from the offer, Apple said that they will also issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery.
As of now, the company is facing eight lawsuits filed in California, New York, and Illinois over the issue.