Sam Oliver
Crushing demand for the iPhone 5 has proven to be too much for Apple's manufacturing partner, Foxconn, to handle, as it continues to struggle to produce the device.
Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou admitted on Wednesday that his company is finding it difficult to meet the significant demand for Apple's iPhone 5, according to a report from Reuters. Foxconn is Apple's primary partner for assembly of a number of its devices, including the iPhone.
"It's not easy to make the iPhones," Gou reportedly said. "We are falling short of meeting the huge demand."
Sales of the iPhone 5 have been held back by limited supply since the device launched in September. Apple itself said the company has been "completely blown away" by consumer demand for the device.
In particular, the in-cell touch panel and aluminum chassis featured in the new design of the iPhone 5 are said to have posed quality control issues for both Apple and Foxconn. One unnamed source from Foxconn revealed in October that the iPhone 5 is "the most difficult device" the company has ever been tasked with assembling.
Rumors first surfaced a month ago that Foxconn had expanded production to a subsidiary known as Foxconn International Holdings in an effort to boost production. When asked about that rumor on Wednesday, Gou declined to comment.
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74 Comments
Thank you, Tim Cook, for not being able to build a decent supply chain of Apple products. The news media is having a field day and Wall Street believes every word of it. Samsung can supply tens of millions of its smartphones to consumers without a sweat, but Apple struggles. With loss of innovation and a poor supply chain, there's only one direction for Apple to go and that's down.
I hope this is not true because they need the big sales thru Christmas.
Apple needs a second supply chain, hopefully American. There demand is growing, it's nearly 2 months and people are still waiting,
Foxconn needs to quit whining. If they couldn't handle the job they should have spoken up long before this went into production.
This information without any numbers is only so much wall street fodder.
If they can only just produce 100 a day then this is a problem
but if the can only produce 1000000 a day then this is more of an over demand problem than a production one
Even if it is harder to assemble I'm sure they are still producing huge numbers of phones