Apple Agrees to Price Hikes to Ensure Touch Panel Supply?

Apple has perfected the art of generating enough supply of parts to churn out vast amounts of product inventory, to keep up with iPhone and iPad demand. Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook, is the wizard behind the management of Apple’s supply chain and he has done a remarkable job to date.

According to Digitimes, Apple has been in talks with their suppliers based in Taiwan about the notion of rate hikes to secure touch panel numbers. With Apple’s war chest of over $50 billion dollars in cash, paying more to ensure they continue to churn out products for customers would not be a problem.

In order to secure sufficient supply of touch panels used in the iPad and iPhone, Apple has talked with Taiwan-based makers, considering some room for them to hike quotes, according to these makers.

With Apple’s capacity, It is a reasonable strategy from Apple to allow suppliers to hike quotes, and it will be a great help to the overall supply chain, even just for the short term, but will increase pressure to other vendors for tablet PCs and smartphone, touch panel makers believed.

By dictating the supply and price of touchscreen panels, this could further increase pressure on Apple’s competition to keep up. With iPhone 5 around the corner and an International iPad 2 launch this Friday (Canada too!), it’s a no-brainer for Apple to keep touch panels in high supply.

[Digitimes]

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