Guo Mingqi: Apple's hardware shipment volume this year has been revised down due to a memory shortage.

On August 11, Guo Mingqi, an analyst at Tianfeng International Securities who has been tracking the Apple supply chain for years, released an industry survey showing that Apples hardware shipment volume has been downgraded this year due to a shortage of memory. However, Apple's processor orders with TSMC will be planned based on the available memory quantities at least about three months in advance, rather than having TSMC ramp up production of semi-finished products ahead of time. This does not imply that TSMC will not produce and stockpile semi-finished products in advance; however, if the bottleneck does not lie with TSMC, there is no real benefit to doing so. Therefore, Apple has little incentive to pay extra for TSMC to take such actions. While the memory supply is tight, my understanding is that there hasnt been any dramatic change such as TSMC stockpiling $1 billion worth of semi-finished products and then waiting for memory to be delivered for packaging. Both TSMC and Apple are among the worlds top executors, and with their close collaboration in supply chain management, such dramatic developments are unlikely to occur.