Sales of the pricey new iPhone X are reportedly much lower than Apple expected, so the company has slashed production volumes for the coming months.
A new report from Nikkei Asian Review says Apple will cut its production target in half for the iPhone X for the three-month period beginning in January. The number will reportedly drop from 40 million units to 20 million.
“The U.S. tech giant notified suppliers that it had decided to cut the target for the period to around 20 million units, in light of slower-than-expected sales in the year-end holiday shopping season in key markets such as Europe, the U.S., and China,” reads the report, quoting anonymous sources within Apple’s supply chain.
According to the report, Apple has already notified suppliers that is has reduced its target to around 20 million units due to the slower-than-expected sales of the device during the holiday season 2017. The iOS 11 flagship phone particularly did not perform well in key markets such as China, Europe and the U.S., and some analysts are claiming that this could have been the effect of its very expensive price tag.
While Apple is said to be maintaining the level of production for the rest of its smartphone range, the production cuts for the iPhone X will have a significant impact on companies supplying components for the new phone, with the combined impact expected to run into billions of dollars.
The report comes just a day after well-placed analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported that Apple would launch a new version of the iPhone later this year with a similar design to the X but with an LCD screen rather than an OLED display, which could help the company recover from “lower than expected” iPhone X sales.
