Morgan Stanley reported on Friday that the US-based tech giant Apple may experience a maximum four percent drop in its revenue this year after China ordered officials at central government agencies to not use Apple’s iPhones and other foreign-branded devices for work or bring them into the office.
Analyst Erik W Woodring said Apple’s share losses in the last two days were ”overdone” as he does not believe the curbs will lead to something broader, Reuters reported.
As per Reuters, China, under the Xi Jinping government, has grown more concerned over data security and has rolled out new laws and compliance requirements for companies.
Earlier this year, China urged big state-owned enterprises to play a key role in its drive to attain self-reliance in technology, raising the stakes in the race amid rifts with the United States, the report said.
The ban from China comes ahead of a mega Apple event next week where the company will be launching a new line of iPhones.
Meanwhile, Apple recently rolled out security updates that fixed two serious security issues. Recently, Citizen Lab, in a blogpost, said that they have found a serious security problem last week - a zero-click vulnerability.
It means that hackers can attack without the person receiving the malware having to click on anything, like an attachment. They also said the vulnerability was used as part of an exploit chain designed to deliver NSO Group’s malware, known as Pegasus.
“The exploit chain was capable of compromising iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without any interaction from the victim,” Citizen Lab wrote in a blogpost. Once they found the vulnerability, the researchers reported it to Apple, which released a patch on Thursday.
The Cupertino-based tech giant also patched another vulnerability and attributed its finding to the company itself. A report from TechCrunch suggested that the company might have found the second vulnerability while investigating the first.
