Like many Apple presentations over the past few years, the announcement of the iPhone SE in March 2016 was expected and unexpected at the same time. Expected — in terms of the General idea: everyone was prepared for the fact that “fruit” giant will release a more affordable phone with a small diagonal display. The surprise was that the case was exactly identical to the iPhone 5s, and the hardware characteristics, on the contrary, inherited from the iPhone 6s, current at the time the flagship of Apple.
KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes that the Cupertino-based company has no plans to upgrade to iPhone SE. The device will be sold in a year after entering the market, which can be a big mistake. The expert believes that will lead to a further decline in iPhone sales in the first half of 2017
According to Kuo’s estimates, the supply of iPhone in the first quarter of next year will be at the level of 40-50 million units, while a year earlier they amounted to 51.2 million units. And if in the second quarter of this year kupertinovtsy shipped 40,4 million smartphones in the second quarter of next year supply should reach 35-40 million units, predicts analyst.
Kuo believes that Apple will put pressure on suppliers of components, trying to bring down prices. Due to large competition, some suppliers will give up in November-December this year, but not all. For example, Samsung, which is a major supplier of memory modules 3 GB and the flash memory can not only keep prices at the same level, but to raise them. The reason is the increased demand for memory, which will remain in the first quarter of 2017.
The announcement of the iPhone 8 in the fall of next year, Kuo calls the most important for Apple in the last three years. According to the analyst, the new product will dramatically spur sales of “Apple” smartphones.
