With the coronavirus outbreak still ongoing, it has been generally advised that if you don’t need to go out and interact with people, you should probably stay home. Those who have also made recent trips to China have also been told that they should self-quarantine in order to prevent the virus from potentially spreading to others.
As such, we imagine that there is going to be an uptick of people staying at home more often for the foreseeable future, and it seems that companies such as Apple could benefit from it. This is according to Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty who suggests that due to the fact that more people are staying home (or planning to stay home), revenue for the App Store could increase as people are finding more ways to keep themselves entertained.
As ghoulish as this sounds, Huberty has some evidence to back up her claims. One of which is from Tencent, who will be expanding their server capacities for one of their online games which saw an uptick in players during the Lunar New Year, especially after many festivities were cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak.
She also points to App Store data which showed a 22.5% year-over-year growth for the month of January. While Huberty specifically mentions Apple, we imagine that the same could also be applied to other app stores, such as the Google Play Store, although we don’t have the data for that.