Apple’s iPhone sales growth expected to stagnate

The iPhone has long been Apple’s profit monster but what happens when that monster stops growing? Fortune takes a look at consensus projections for how many iPhones Apple sold over the past quarter and it seems that analysts barely expect the company to report any year-over-year sales growth for its ever-popular smartphone. In all, consensus analyst estimates project Apple will sell between 26.7 million and 27.9 million iPhones on the quarter, which is just a little more than the 26 million iPhones the company sold over the same period in 2012. While these sorts of numbers still make Apple the envy of most of the smartphone industry, it does explain why Apple is making a concerted push to release a cheap device for emerging markets, since there are real concerns that the iPhone has now hit its growth potential in saturated mature markets.

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This article was originally published on BGR.com