Apple shares fell nearly 4 percent after a report signaled that its new, lower-priced iPhone XR might not be selling as well as expected.…
Apple shares fell nearly 4 percent after a report signaled that its new, lower-priced iPhone XR might not be selling as well as expected.
Japanese news service Nikkei reported Monday that Apple has asked its Chinese suppliers including Foxconn to halt plans for additional production lines of the newly released iPhone XR, whose price starts at $749 instead of $999 and up for the other new iPhones.
The report noted that Apple’s directive translates to about 100,000 fewer iPhone XRs being made each day.
“For the Foxconn side, it first prepared nearly 60 assembly lines for Apple’s XR model, but recently uses only around 45 production lines as its top customer said it does not need to manufacture that many by now,” the Nikkei quoted one source as saying.
Apple’s iPhone XR, which boasts the iPhone X’s edge-to-edge display, albeit using older LCD pixels instead of the X’s high-resolution OLED screen, was widely expected to fuel a massive wave of upgrades from users of the iPhone 6S or earlier models.
The Nikkei report comes days after Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple warned in its quarterly earnings report that sales for the crucial holiday quarter would likely miss Wall Street expectations.
Apple also stoked worries about iPhone sales last week when it said that it that beginning this quarter, it will no longer break down unit sales for iPhones, iPads and Macs.
“If the reports are accurate, we do find it somewhat disturbing that this would take place so early after the launch of the iPhone XR,” Angelo Zino, an analyst at CFRA, said of the Nikkei report.
“We did not witness any notable order push-outs for the iPhone XR after the initial week of its launch, which is the first time we can say that about a new phone release that took place in the fall,” Zino added.
Apple shares were down 3.6 percent in Monday afternoon trading, at $200.14.
With Reuters
