Nikkei称苹果折叠iPhone初期日产仅数百台，量产爬坡慢于目标

TAIPEI -- Initial production of Apple's long-awaited foldable iPhone is currently limited to only a "few hundred" units a day, mainly due to the company's extremely high quality control standards, sources have told Nikkei Asia.
The U.S. company is working hard to ramp up output, they added.
"Apple has very high quality requirements and added an extra trial run in August ahead of actual production. However, production is ramping up slowly, with output currently at only a few hundred units a day in late August. That initial volume could be challenging to meet market demand," one supply chain manager with knowledge of the matter told Nikkei Asia.
Apple has targeted production of 8 million to 10 million foldable iPhones this year and hopes the new form-factor model can energize the market and boost its revenue, Nikkei Asia reported earlier.
However, it could fall short of its production target unless it can ramp up output more quickly, potentially taking longer than expected to meet customer demand. Normally, tens of thousands of phones would need to be produced each day to meet the planned production goal for the foldable iPhone, industry executives told Nikkei Asia.
The Cupertino, California-based tech giant has previously encountered some snags in the engineering and test production processes for the foldable iPhones this year, as it has much more stringent quality and durability standards than rival smartphone makers, including testing under more extreme conditions, requiring significantly more folding cycles, and demanding greater screen flatness.
"The surface flatness and the performance of the hinge are among the details where Apple is asking for better production yields," said another person with knowledge of the situation.
Two people familiar with the situation told Nikkei Asia that Apple carried out an additional verification process in August for the foldable iPhone to ensure the phone can be mass-produced according to its specified design, which pushed back commercial production for weeks.
Apple and its suppliers are working around the clock to ramp up daily production. Doing so however, will take time, and the earlier tests and verification processes have already postponed the planned schedule. The current situation, if not improved, could possibly result in limited stocks at distribution channels when sales of the foldable phone begin.
The global smartphone industry has been hit by unprecedented shortages of memory and other electronic components amid the massive buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure. The smartphone market is set to decline 16.7% this year, while the memory shortage will push up the average selling prices for smartphones by around 27.6%, IDC's latest forecast showed.
Apple has been less affected than many of its more price-sensitive Chinese smartphone rivals, including Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo, which have had to cut their forecasts significantly due to memory and other electronic component constraints. Apple's global market share increased to 20.2% in the April-to-June quarter thanks to its larger bargaining power and having more premium models, compared with 16.3% the same time last year, IDC's data showed.
To optimize memory allocation and marketing resources, Apple is also focusing on its three most premium iPhone models this year, while the launch of the standard iPhone has been pushed to next spring, Nikkei Asia earlier reported.
Chinese smartphone rival Huawei is set to release the latest generation of its triple-fold phones on Monday, ahead of Apple's flagship product launch event.
Apple did not respond to Nikkei Asia's request for comment.