Apple expects to ship 20% more iPhones in 2021 than this year
The autumn appearance of the first Apple smartphones with support for 5G networks undoubtedly revived iPhone sales, customers have to wait up to four weeks for deliveries of some models of the 12th family. In the first half of 2021, Apple expects to sell 30% more smartphones than a year earlier. The growth for the entire year should be 20%.
The Nikkei Asian Review shares similar predictions with reference to comments from Apple partners. The iPhone production plan for the first half of the year is from 95 to 96 million devices, the source explains. This is 30% more than in the same period last year. The main growth will be provided by models of the iPhone 12 family with 5G support, but Apple will not abandon the release of the iPhone 11 and iPhone SE in the coming year.
Apple partners claim that demand for the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max has exceeded market expectations, the base model of the iPhone 12 has met the forecast for the amount of demand, but the iPhone 12 mini is selling worse than expected. For two years, Apple has faced a decrease in the volume of sales of smartphones, which is why it even excluded information on the number of copies sold from quarterly statistics, replacing it with a monetary equivalent. According to IDC, in the first nine months of this year, Apple managed to sell about 116 million iPhones – about 1% less than in the same period last year.
By the end of 2021, the company expects to sell 230 million smartphones – this corresponds to an increase of 20% compared to the forecast for 2020. Nevertheless, the result of 2021 will only come close to the record of 2015, when Apple managed to sell 231.5 million smartphones. The manufacturer’s plans for 2021 will be subject to adjustments in line with market conditions. Restraining factors will be not only the continuing shortage of components but also the struggle of competitors for market share Huawei, which was forced to abandon the use of its own HiSilicon processors as a result of US sanctions.
Next year, according to the source, Apple will aggressively migrate to its own M1 processors MacBook Pro laptops and all-in-one iMac Pro. The company is tasked with completely eliminating Intel processors from the PC segment in two years. The Apple TV set-top box should also be updated in the coming year, as the source notes. Experts expect that the iPhone generation planned for the announcement in the fall of 2021 will not be able to surpass its predecessors in popularity, and the final production volumes in 2021 will not exceed 220 million smartphones of various models.
