Ahead of Apple’s seminal ‘iPhone Pro,’ chip demand from the wannabe phone makers slows
“Chip suppliers engaged in Apple’s supply chain started to see orders pick up in June,” Julian Ho and Jessie Shen report for DigiTimes. “On the other hand, chip demand from the non-Apple camp has been slow, according to sources at backend houses, which do not expect orders from their non-Apple customers to rise substantially until the fourth quarter.”
“Fabless firms including MediaTek and HiSilicon continue to slow down their pace of orders, said the sources, which warned of disappointing handset-chip shipments from the non-Apple camp in the third quarter,” Ho and Shen report. “Chip orders from the non-Apple camp should have picked up starting April and grown through August, but orders seem to have been pushed back in 2017 as companies adopt a wait-and-see approach before the launch of Apple’s upcoming iPhones which they believe will come with revolutionary features, the sources indicated.”
Ho and Shen report, “Apple’s iPhone sales are expected to sustain demand for TSMC’s 10nm mobile chips through the first quarter of 2018, the sources added.”
