“The waiting time for iPhone 5s has shortened significantly as major assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. has been running its factories around the clock, adding more workers to its production lines,” Lorraine Luk reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“Apple is now shipping all variations of the iPhone 5S smartphones within three to five business days, compared to a two- to-three- week wait last month, according to the company’s online stores in China and the U.S.,” Luk reports. “Hon Hai, also known by its trade name Foxconn, has boosted production capacity for the iPhone 5S at the expense of the cheaper iPhone 5C as requested by Apple, people familiar with the situation told The Wall Street Journal last month. ”
“The company has about 300,000 workers at its Zhengzhou site, dedicated to just making the iPhone 5S and key components such as metal casings. To get a glimpse of just how complicated it is to manufacture the iPhone 5S, Hon Hai executives said the company has about 600 workers on each iPhone 5S production line to handle assembly work,” Luk reports. “‘We have been churning out about 500,000 iPhone 5Ss everyday, the highest daily output ever,’ said the executive who declined to be named… For the iPhone 5C or the iPhone 5, we only have 500 workers per production line as the assembly procedure is less complicated.'”
Read more in the full article here.
[Attribution: 9to5Mac. hanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
Those rumours are oftentimes made up, unreliable. The more so besides Foxconn at least another one manufacturer assembles iPhones — Pegatron.
Overall, Apple expected to sell 53-58 million iPhones (versus 46 million in last year’s calendar Q4).
FIRE Tim Cook!
So, the news is that Apple is still trying to make it to the place they should have been when Tim announced the latest fingerprint model of the great new phone. Is there no recognition by the MDN world of posters at what this actually says about how Apple is run these days? Somewhere there must be a record of how many people who wanted the 5S, couldn’t get it because there weren’t any in any kind of retail store – Apple or any other – so they went down the line of overwhelming choices of cheaper phones with more features – most of them with the Samsung logo on them – and bought one or more of those instead.
Since Tim and his board don’t care about lost profits and since numbskulls here will blindly defend the hapless Mr. Cook, who cares? Answer: investors care. That’s why AAPL is where it is and where it will remain until someone comes in and leads the company back to prominence in the world of tech gadgets.
I can’t stop laughing! Apple has to produce a half million iPhones per DAY to catch up with demand, and you want fabricate a criticism. You must be a very unhappy person and a real downer at parties.
I don’t think he’s invited to parties.
Either that or he’s a complete idiot.
Thats already a given.
the latter
His criticism IS valid. However his tying it to the stock price is NOT valid.
Apple IS losing sales because iPhones are not on the shelves. The vast majority of the brick and mortar stores (Apple or other) are out of the iPhone 5S well before the end of the day, and many don’t have any to start the day. Thus those who need a top tier phone *today* or are impulse buys (and there are a lot of people who fit into those two catagories) will buy something else, and that is a sale lost.
However… The stock market has become so disconnected from reality that it almost does not matter at all what volumes of iPhones Apple is selling. If there were a direct connection then AAPL would have shot up and stayed up after the announcement of the 9 million iPhone weekend and subsequent news that Apple is selling every iPhone and iPad it can make.
Same old scratched record eh. In your world no doubt everyone who ever wanted an iPhone should have been sold one in the first week, or being kind the first month perhaps, it doesn’t work that way. You can’t simply build up massive production to deal with everyone for a few months and then find out you have massive excess capacity as a result, its far more nuanced than that. Apple may not have hit the line right (and that does deserve some criticism) but the one you are drawing would clearly be a disaster if they tried to hit it. Even a Samsung troll can understand the reaction of the press to all those reduced orders coming in thereafter despite it being inevitable, mainly because after the first month or so despite all its bullshit Samsung has found itself struggling to maintain capacity by all accounts for its G4.
Apple is doomed or something because they are producing half a million top line iPhone 5S’s a day and should have done it when they launched.
Apple is doomed or something because they are over producing now and are at the peak of their sales.
If Apple had produced the half million iPhone 5S’s a day at launch, there are those who would have said, “Apple is doomed because one of the days there were 5000 phones unsold.”
Apple is doomed or something because Samsung never did produce half a million iPhone wannabes ever and are selling them to poor and cheap clueless people.
How many ways can people think of to twist Apple’s huge success into their version of failure?
@ 3l3c7ro — well said!
Ringing the changes of doom! Well done, Quasimodo! You have won Esmeralda’s heart!
Quasimodo? Didn’t he play hunchback for Notre Dame? I was never sure if that was somewhere between fullback and quarterback.
You know most companies announce a product long before it’s ever actually released. Why do they do this? To hopefully keep potential customers from buying a competing product.
Would you rather Apple announced the iPhone 5s back in September, and then waited all this time before actually releasing it? Just what good would that have done anyway? There are millions and millions of iPhone 5s users that are glad Apple operates the way it does; announce a product and release it while there’s still buzz in the air.
Having a backlog of orders is NOTHING new in any industry. It happens. Demand at initial release of a new product is too great to be able to prepare for. So over time supply has to catch up to it. That’s just the way it goes. Do not understand the logistics here? You can’t just flip a switch and have have 500,000 assembly workers ready to go to meet initial demand.
Blindly defend Mr. Cook? This is nothing new to Apple; the iPhone has always had a huge backlog or orders, even when Steve Jobs was still running things. In fact, most of Apple’s products have had an initial backlog. If anyone is blind, it’s you – blind, irrational hatred for Tim Cook.
300,000 workers at one facility, that’s sick! Imagine putting a roof over Pittsburgh.
Love my 5S!
My son was finally able to upgrade his 4s to 5s (White) in Chicago Apple Store. They were getting TWO shipments per day and that still wasn’t keeping up with demand and this week they finally started getting enough to handle typical day’s sales.
Folks wanting to do in-store upgrading (and can’t wait a couple of days between trade-in and new device) still have to have one waiting for them at the store.
Personally I was OK selling it at Amazon as that credit is pretty much like cash for me.
Anyone who thinks the ramp up wasn’t predetermined is ignorant of any manufacturing process.
Can you imagine the traffic with 300,000 workers trying to get to work?