Taiwan-based Digitimes’ Jessie Shen is reporting that the Chinese-language Commercial Times last week quoted Dan Heyler, a semiconductor analyst with Merrill Lynch in Taipei suggesting that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has a good shot at securing some orders from Apple for its next-generation A6 iOS device processors in 2012, which would presumably indicate an iPhone 6 could arrive next year.
Samsung Electronics in Korea currently manufactures Apple’s A4 iPhone 4 and iPad 1 processors and the A5 processors used in the iPad 2 and soon the iPhone 5 as well if events unfold as widely expected. However, with Apple suing Samsung over an unrelated matter, the two companies can be regarded as feuding frenemies at best, so it isn’t surprising that Apple might be seeking an alternate supplier for its iOS device processor silicon.
Speaking of the iPhone 5, Digitimes Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai say Apple will split an early production this fall between Foxconn Electronics (a division of Hon Hai Precision Industry) and Pegatron Technology, who between them are predicted (at least by Digitimes’ customary unnamed industry sources) to produce a ramp-up of some 15 million units ahead of the iPhone 5 launch and during the new handset’s first four weeks of sales. That’s a lot of iPhones, even in a global context!
Continuing in that context, BGR’s Zach Epstein cited a note to investors released last Thursday by Ticonderoga Securities far east industry analyst Brian White, in which White says Chinese service provider China Mobile, which is reportedly the world’s largest mobile phone company with 611 million wireless subscribers, will be launching Apple’s fifth-generation iPhone in September Wall Street Journal blogger Loretta Chao reports that a China Mobile employee named Liu Yang had spilled the beans on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-style Chinese micro-blogging network, although the post was soon deleted.
WSJ’s Chao also noted reports that Apple COO and acting CEO Tim Cook quietly visited China Mobile this week in Beijing. Anyone who thinks it peculiar that Apple would launch a marquee new product in China simultaneously with the U.S. release, or perhaps even before a U.S. release, as we noted in the iPhone 5 News Ticker over the weekend might ponder that China is now Apple’s largest iPhone market after the U.S., and it seems only a matter of time before iPhone sales there surpass domestic U.S. market volumes. The Chinese economy is leading what world economic growth there is these days, and there are reportedly now some 534,500 Chinese U.S. dollar millionaires (America has 3.1 million millionaires according to the annual World Wealth Report from Merrill Lynch and Capgemini) and amazingly for what is still at least officially a communist country, 115 billionaires (America has 412). There’s a lot of trickle-down potential there, and the Chinese have a taste for high-end stuff, like Apple computers and igadgets. As a Canadian journalist Michael Vaughn observed on a recent trip to check out the auto industry and market in China, “They can’t vote, but they sure can shop!”
Whatever, Mr. Liu’s indiscretion (I hope he doesn’t lose his job) adds a bit more indication that an iPhone 5 release is coming, at least somewhere, in September. Fortune’s resident Apple-watcher Philip Elmer-DeWitt says Ticonderoga Securities’ White has a boilerplate macro on his computer that states:
“We believe the ramp of the mobile Internet in China will be one of the great wonders of the tech world over the next decade and the country has clearly caught “Apple fever” that we believe will only accelerate as the company expands it carrier base to include both China Mobile and China Telecom.”
Elmer-DeWitt also notes that Apple’s Chinese sales hit $5 billion in sales in the company’s first two quarters of fiscal 2011, sharply up from a total of $3 billion in all of 2010, even though Apple has access to only a small fraction of China’s 896 million mobile wireless subscribers, since it’s currently only supported by just one of China’s three largest mobile carriers, the smaller China Unicom, although China Mobile had already announced its intention to carry 4G iPhones when a LTE version is ready. That won’t be the iPhone 5, but Chinese demand for a 4G model could provide a strong incentive for Apple to get the A6 chip on stream and an iPhone 6 ready.
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