Apple’s iPhone production in quarter three shows a ‘stable growth trend’

According to TrendForce’s latest research, global smartphone production totaled around 289 million units for the third quarter of 2022, showing a slight quarter-over-quarter drop of 0.9% and a year-over-year drop of 11%. However, it was mostly good news for Apple.

Apple posted 50.8 million units in iPhone production for the third quarter of 2022, showing a stable growth trend, according to TrendForce. The research group says the tech giant benefited from the reallocation of the demand that were originally going to Huawei’s smartphones as well as the optimal pricing for the new iPhone models, 

What’s more, the third quarter is usually the production ramp-up period as Apple intends to push sales of the new iPhone models to their peak in the fourth quarter. Following the release of the iPhone 14 series, much of the demand for the new iPhone models has been tilted towards the Pro subseries. 

Accordingly, Apple has also adjusted the share distribution of the different new models in iPhone production. However, Foxconn’s EMS base in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou has recently experienced a drop in capacity utilization rate due to a local COVID-19 outbreak. Since the base is also Apple’s main site for manufacturing the iPhone Pro models, this incident will impact the total iPhone production in the fourth quarter of 2022, reports TrendForce.

The research group says the smartphone market exhibited an extremely weak demand situation in the third quarter as the “iron law” of positive growth in the third quarter was broken after being in effect for years. The contraction of smartphone production during this year’s peak season was mainly attributed to smartphone brands giving priority to consumption of channel inventory for whole devices and maintaining a fairly conservative production plan for quarter three, adds the research group. Moreover, they had kept lowering their production targets due to strong global economic headwinds.

Regarding the performances of the major smartphone brands besides Apple, Samsung posted around 64.2 million units in device production, showing a quarter-over-quarter increase of just 3.9%. Trendforce says Samsung is expected to again post a quarter-over-quarter decline for the fourth quarter of 2022.