As one of the world's most knowledgeable analysts of Apple's supply chain, Guo Mingqi's predictions and reports have also become an important way for the market to obtain relevant information.
In early April, Guo Mingqi tweeted: "AirPods 3 orders in the second and third quarters of 2022 will be reduced by more than 30%, due to the failure of the product segmentation strategy, the demand for AirPods 3 is significantly weaker than AirPods 2." The AirPods Pro may be discontinued after Apple launched the AirPods Pro 2 at 2H22 to avoid repeating the same mistake. ”
A stone stirs up a thousand layers of waves. After the above news was spread in the market, the stock price of the AirPods supply chain fell in response. In this regard, Jiwei Network also further understood the matter of "cutting orders" through interviews with supply chain and industry analysts.
Suppliers are still hiring in large numbers
Although the enterprises represented by Luxshare Precision and Goertek did not respond positively to the news; but later media reported that "the overtime work of employees in The Dongguan and Ji'an factories of Luxshare Precision was reduced", which testified to Guo Mingqi's prediction.
Jiwei Network saw through the search of the brand headset list of Zhongguancun Online that the sales and popularity of airpods pro are indeed much higher than airpods 3, which is still at the top of the list, while the airpods 3 that have just been released have fallen to the eighth position of the list, and the brands in front of it include: Magic, Sony, Huawei and Redmi.
All indications show that the airpods 3 market performance is indeed not as good as the previous products, coupled with the continued decline in the prosperity of the entire consumer electronics market this year, Apple's action of cutting orders seems reasonable.
It is worth noting that when the author checked the information, he found that Jiangxi Lixun Intelligent Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Ji'an Lixun") located in Ji'an, Jiangxi Province, is still recruiting a large number of production line workers recently, and the relevant recruiters also said: "The employees recruited in this round are mainly assigned to the A6 and A7 workshops in the factory area, and there are overtime hours every day, and the working hours are about 11 hours." ”
In fact, the A6/A7 workshop in the Ji'an Lixun factory is a 'good place' for a large number of production line employees.
As the two largest workshops in the factory area, overtime is relatively more, which is undoubtedly able to receive more salaries for production line employees. Jiwei Network learned that the monthly salary of an employee of a production line in the factory area is about 5400 yuan, which is much higher than the minimum wage (about 1700 yuan) in Ji'an County, Ji'an City (where the Ji'an Lixun factory is located), which is classified into the three categories of Jiangxi Province.
Combined with the foregoing, the logic of Airpods 3's sharp cuts and the large number of recruitments from the main supplier Luxshare Precision Production Line seems to be contrary to each other. In this regard, some analysts believe that Luxun Precision's supplementary production line employees may be related to the epidemic situation in the Yangtze River Delta region.
"At this stage, in addition to Foxconn, Taiwanese factories are basically concentrated in the Yangtze River Delta region and Sichuan Province, the Yangtze River Delta region is affected by the large-scale spread of the epidemic, Shanghai and Suzhou are almost all stopped, Inventec's production capacity may be affected, so Luxun's large number of recruits at this point in time may be more from the share transfer to prepare." The other party said.
Some industry insiders familiar with Apple's supply chain told the author: "At present, for Apple, the most important thing is production capacity. Under the premise of the continuous spread of the epidemic in the Yangtze River Delta, as long as the production capacity can be guaranteed, I think Apple will not be limited to the price fluctuations caused by the share adjustment. ”
So back to the "cutting orders" thing, what is the reason for this result?
Predictable changes in demand
At the first level, the product itself is not competitive enough. For a large part of TWS headphone users, noise reduction is a very important selling point, as the cost has declined, the active noise cancellation function has even become the "standard" of many brands of TWS headphones. However, the Airpods 3, priced at 1399, cannot support active noise reduction. In the context of the increasingly fierce competition in the TWS headset market, the new products that have faded Apple's "halo" are very low in terms of innovation and cost performance.
On the second level, the consumer electronics market is sluggish. The above-mentioned industry insiders also said: "The overall market of the consumer electronics market this year is not good for all to see, coupled with many existing unfavorable factors, including the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the epidemic, inflation, etc., whether it is Apple or its supply chain will be combined with the actual situation to make predictions on the volume of orders." At least in my opinion, Luxun, as a supplier with deep and long-term cooperation with Apple, cannot be without a little judgment on order adjustment. ”
"In fact, after judging that customers will not have strong demand, suppliers will definitely cut production line employees in order to control costs, so that the saturation of factory production line employees will remain at about 80%-90%; suddenly a large number of recruits, one possibility is that the actual order situation is higher than Luxun's previous forecast of customer demand."
Not long ago, the international research agency IDC also lowered its forecast for the terminal market for the whole year of 2022.
According to the IDC report, the initial expected shipment volume of China's end market in 2022 is 880 million units, a growth rate of 6.0%. Among them, smartphone shipments were 310 million units, down 5.5% year-on-year, and PC shipments were 60 million units, up 4.3% year-on-year. However, as of the beginning of April, the uninterrupted epidemic in various places has led to a significant increase in market inventories, and the uncertainties in logistics, upstream accessories and machine production are also more prominent; at the same time, combined with the recent increase in the cost of raw materials such as crude oil. Under the comprehensive judgment, IDC will lower the terminal market forecast for the whole year of 2022, of which smartphones, PCs, monitors, etc. have a greater impact; wearables, tablets, etc. Have a relatively small impact.
Obviously, the impact of environmental changes has almost covered 2022, which will undoubtedly put pressure on the entire technology industry; in this regard, high-quality enterprises with strong anti-risk ability can often give corresponding countermeasures according to changes in the situation, on the contrary, some enterprises that continue to advocate the market should sound the alarm bell in time.
(Proofreading/New)