KGI: iPhone Stock up Nearly 3 Million Available for Launch

The production bottleneck for Apple’s iPhone X has been gradually eased, and shortages of key components such as mobile circuit boards should end in November, and Foxconn has already produced for about 3 million iPhone X for the market, Ming-Chi Kuo said in a research report, who is the KGI securities analyst of Taiwan.

With iPhone 8 now on sale, all eyes are on the upcoming iPhone X. many reports said that Apple had not prepared for enough quantity of iPhone X, but now this issue seems to be solved by Apple. A morning report from KGI reiterates production issues of iPhone X is coming stable with line yield assembly, and indicating that only 2-3 million units will be shipped for sale before the launch on November 3rd (preorders open a week from today).

The interesting thing is that, Ming-Chi Kuo thinks the issue of flexible printed circuit board (FPCB) mostly is the supply shortages during the production of iPhone X. but the truth is that, those hardware related to the TrueDepth camera system is the key point to production, which is hard to overcome from the past reviews. Specifically speaking, FPCB is in the first place of main hurdle, which the wide Angle camera module is on the second.

Several reports in the past have said the 3D sensor production is the reason for the holdup, today’s KGI report mentions the dot projector but says there are other components in even shorter supply to be aware of.

Kuo also dropped the shipment expectation of iPhone X from 30-35 million to 25-30 million units in the fourth quarter sealing, and KGI still believes shipments could increase by as much as 50% in the first quarter of 2018.