Even as Apple is bracing for an eventful 2022 with a slew of new products, its iPhone 13 series is turning out to be a cash cow of sorts. The company reportedly sold 40 million units of the handsets during the holiday season and may as well continue to post brisk sales for the next couple of quarters.
A new research report brought out the success of the iPhone 13 series in the market and also questioned Apple's ability to keep up the sales numbers, given its continued supply chain issues. In fact, the report by Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives claimed that the company faced a supply shortage of 12 million units during the holiday quarter.
In other words, Apple continues to be stuck in the supply side constraints which had been reported earlier in the lead-up to the festival season. Had there been no supply chain issues, the Cupertino-based tech giant would have added 25% additional sales over the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year season.
Back in November, reports said Apple could be grappling with this supply crunch for at least another three to four months. A report in Digitimes suggested that in spite of suppliers increasing production, the situation may not ease till end-February. Apple had shipped over 50 million iPhones in the third quarter of 2021.
- Check out our exhaustive review of the iPhone 13
- Here's why the iPhone 13 Pro makes a great-looking package
Analyst predicts happy days ahead for Apple
However, Daniel Ives is confident of Apple growing its services revenue substantially. In the report published by Philip Elmer-DeWitt, the analyst says the market seems to have valued Apple's services business alone at $1.5 trillion. He also predicted that Apple would become the first publicly traded firm to be valued at $3 trillion dollars, threshold it had breached briefly earlier this week.
On his part, Daniel Ives said instead of focusing on the public perception of Apple, the research viewed the supply chain positions over the past few weeks as the basis of this analysis. "... we believe demand is outstripping supply for Apple by roughly 12 million units in December quarter, which now will add to the tailwinds for Cupertino in March and June quarters as the supply chain issues ease in 1H22," he says.
Apple's growing India connect could be a reason
We believe that a big part of improving the supply chain challenges could come from India. Apple's contract manufacturer Foxconn began trial production of the iPhone 13 at its Sriperumbudur (near India's southern port city of Chennai). It is expected to start shipments of Apple's current flagship model by February 2022.
Just so that you're aware, the Foxconn plant already manufactures iPhone 11 and iPhone 12 while the iPhone SE is rolled out from the Wistron plant in Bengaluru. The third apple assembler in India, Pegatron, is still to get going with production.
There is however a fly in the ointment (or is it worms in the porridge?) that Apple needs to get rid of. The Foxconn factory scheduled to manufacture the iPhone 13 had to be shut down following protests over food quality supplied at a hostel where several of the workers stay. The latest update is that the factory could reopen within the next two days after ensuring requisite compliances.
Apple could also be buoyed by the federal Indian government's proposal to get the top chipset makers into the country. It had already sounded out top chip-making companies such as TSMC, Intel, AMD, Fujitsu and United Microelectronics Corp to try and set up manufacturing base in the country.
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