Thanks to guidance from mobile chipmakers in recent months, it was no surprise that Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) reported sluggish iPhone sales for its quarter ended June 2023. The tech titan's phone revenue declined 2% year over year or notched a slight increase when excluding the effects of foreign currency exchange rates.

To this day, the iPhone still represents more than half of all of Apple's revenue ($157 billion of the $294 billion total through the first nine months of Apple's current fiscal year). More robust, profitable iPhone growth will be a must for Apple stock to justify its high premium of 30 times trailing-12-month earnings (or 28 times free cash flow). Top mobile chip supplier Skyworks Solutions (NASDAQ: SWKS) provides some hints on what could lay ahead.  

Skyworks Solutions is a top designer and manufacturer of mobile chips -- the stuff that enables devices like smartphones to connect to a wireless network or Wi-Fi. This makes it especially reliant on consumer electronics sales, an area of the semiconductor industry that has been beaten up badly after massive household spending during the first two years of the pandemic. 

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Source Fool.com