According to people familiar with the matter, Apple has suspended its plan to increase production of new iPhones this year, citing: There is no expected strong demand.
Apple will increase production after release in previous years to meet the needs of the shopping season at the end of the year. Apple raised its sales forecast a few weeks before the launch of the iPhone 14 series, and some suppliers also expected orders to be increased by 7% and prepared for it.
However, people familiar with the matter revealed that Apple has informed suppliers to cancel the production increase plan of up to 6 million units of the Phone 14 product series in the second half of the year. However, Apple is still scheduled to produce 90 million mobile phones this year, which is about the same level as last year and is also in line with Apple's preliminary forecast for the summer.
China is the world's largest smartphone market and an important position for Apple, but a research report released by Jeferies on Monday pointed out that compared with iPhone 13, the sales of iPhone 14 in China decreased by 10.5% in the first three days of opening in China, indicating that sales of this model may be far from expected.
Sandalwood e-commerce market monitoring data shows that in terms of pre-sales by model, the pre-sales volume of the standard version of the Apple iPhone 14 series on Tmall platform in 7 days decreased by 70% year-on-year, and the pre-sales volume of the Pro series increased by 56% year-on-year; from the perspective of cumulative sales, in the first three days of its release, the sales volume of the standard version of the Apple iPhone 14 decreased by 71% year-on-year compared with the previous generation of iPhone 13, and the sales volume of the Pro series increased by 38% year-on-year. After the news of
, Apple stocks increased their declines, with the foundry Hon Hai falling 2.9%, TSMC fell 2.23%, Sunny Optics fell 3.7%, Daliguang falling 9.04%, and South Korea's LG Innotek also fell more than 10%.
According to some insiders, the demand for iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max is higher than the entry-level model, and some suppliers have even completely transferred the production capacity of iPhone 14 to Pro and Pro Max versions. Lin Zhi, chief analyst at WitDisplay, said: "Because the iPhone 14 standard version has not changed much compared to the previous generation and lacks innovation, more people will choose the Pro series with a higher improvement or the iPhone 13 with a higher cost-effectiveness."
In addition to the influence of product strength factors, the global market demand for personal electronic products has also been disturbed by the surge in inflation, concerns about economic recession and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. According to market tracking agency IDC, smartphone sales are expected to shrink by 6.5% this year to 1.27 billion units.
Tianfeng International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that Apple has asked Hon Hai Foxconn to increase the production of iPhone 14 Pro by 10%. Some internal personnel of Foxconn revealed that due to the neglect of iPhone14, some iPhone14 production lines will be upgraded to iPhone14 Pro series model production lines, but they will not have much impact on production. After the production line is converted, the shipment volume of iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 ProMax will increase from the original 55%-60% to 60%-65%.
