This article is from the WeChat public account: Eoou (ID: i-yiou) , author: Huangzhi Lei, editor: Yang However, a small North, title figure: original courtesy
On March 18, Apple’s new iPad Pro and Macbook Air arrived as scheduled, but consumers simply couldn’t buy it.
Not only that, since the Spring Festival, Apple iPad series products have been in short supply across the board. Due to the supply chain and rising demand for online courses, iPad series products have been out of stock in core cities in China for a long time.
After March 13, Apple ’s offline retail stores in mainland China have been fully open, but the supply side is still stretched. A week later, Apple implemented purchase restrictions.
Apple Distributor: Out of Stock
As an Apple distributor in Chengdu, Liang Lei told Yiou that since the school started online classes in mid-to-February, iPad sales in Sichuan and Chongqing areas have abnormally increased. Among them, iPads are selling the best, and distributor prices are even Higher than the official website, and at this time the official website has been unable to ship.
Liang Lei received a lot of consultations on the iPad Air and iPad mini series. Among them, the iPad mini has very few inventories, and the overall is only 30% ~ 40% of the iPad. Many users can only be forced to choose the iPad. According to Liang Lei estimates, only 2 to 3 months of iPad sales exceeded 30% to 40% over the same period. But at this time, most distributors have been unable to increase their sales because of “out of stock”.
The well-known digital blogger “Bean Sprouts” told Yiou that, in fact, there have been many iPad purchase consultations since the end of January. At that time, an important reason why distributors could not ship was that the warehouse was still closed. Many electronics stores are still closed, and only distributors or distributors in independent warehouses have partial shipping capabilities.
Out of stock also brought up the offer. Because the offline price system may not be consistent with Apple, multiple iPad product lines have exceeded the official website price. Take the standard version of the iPad Air 3 as an example, the quotation in December 2019 is still in the beginning of 3,000 yuan, this year has exceeded the high of 4,000 yuan, the high configuration 256G memory version has also increased by 1,000 yuan.
At the same time, second-hand iPads have also risen in different margins. “Beans have sprouts” found that even iPads purchased by users in 2019 can be sold above the purchase price during the 2020 Spring Festival.
Surge in product demand has also brought about the need to repair and replace old products. Since mid-late February, Liang Lei’s Chengdu market has seen a demand for battery replacement for iPads.
Liang Lei explained that in order to meet the needs of children’s online lessons at home, many families turned out the old models. In order to cope with this demand, Liang Lei and his team can only rely on inventory to sell after the Spring Festival, and only make up for the difference until March, but the actual demand still cannot be fully met.
In addition to local distributors, online e-commerce has also been out of stock. Yiou found that e-commerce platforms including JD.com and Tmall. iPad-based iPad Pro, iPad Air, iPad mini and other products. Only a few SKUs are available, mostly with high-end versions (1T or cellular network version) , and the remaining inventory has also been exhausted.
Euou: 2020 Apple Greater China 52 offline retail stores
In fact, it’s not just tablets. Due to supply problems caused by the epidemic, Apple warned retail store employees in early March that iPhone shortages have affectedIn order to renew customers, customers need to complete the renewal within 2 to 4 weeks. In addition, the pressure of shortage of individual parts still exists.
In addition, Sina Technology cited media sources that the existing iPhone inventory may be low by April and even longer. Sources said that suppliers are doing their best to produce, but the delay cannot be too long, otherwise it will affect Apple’s new product sales strategy in the second half of the year.
Another person in the industry pointed out that, on average, the current capacity of iPhone supply chain suppliers has only recovered about 30% to 50%. “The iPhone supply chain blockage may continue into April, and there are still many obstacles from labor shortages to logistics and transportation.”
Foxconn, as the major iPhone foundry, ushered in the first day of resumption of work in Zhengzhou on February 10.
In order to increase production capacity as quickly as possible, Foxconn has introduced new incentives. According to Tencent.com, Zhengzhou Foxconn has recently launched the “Incentive Award for Epidemic Prevention and Return”, the incentive object is iDPBG (Digital Product Business Group) Employees (excluding the sunshine workshop) , each person is rewarded with 3,000 yuan.
On March 18, the Foxconn Wuhan factory was approved by the local government for resumption of work. The first batch of employees have returned to the park. Foxconn announced that it will resume work in batches in the future, but will not respond to the resumption of work in specific areas.
There are still a lot of employment gaps under the high bonus, and the employment gap also increases the labor burden of workers. Some workers are running high rewards, but they are “teared 6,000 Apple mobile phone films by hand” or “Moving more than 7,000 molds a day” advised to withdraw.
However, Foxconn is still confident in recovering production capacity. Reuters reported that Foxconn plans to restore 80% of production capacity in March and strive to restore all production capacity in April.
In addition, it is reported that, in order to ensure that the iPhone 9 is on schedule, Apple intends to divert orders to BYD to accelerate the mass production of the product.
Web class, the “culprit” for iPad out of stock
In addition to the supply-side and logistics-side shortages caused by the epidemic, rising consumer demand is also the root cause of the shortage.
The first quarter is generally the off-season for Apple products. Although there are Spring Festival promotions in China, generally the previous series of products were released in September of the previous year. Most consumers have gradually increased consumer demand and have gradually declined, so Apple supplies In the first quarter, there were not many orders that were routinely obtained, and this also caused abnormally high demand to exacerbate inventory consumption.
According to the Nikkei Asian Review in early March, Because of the increasing demand for e-learning in China, iPad series products have become popular.
A person familiar with the matter revealed that Apple has increased production orders for the latest iPad models by 20% in the first half of the year. The current shortage of iPad products may last up to 4 weeks, especially for cheap models, and the supply simply cannot meet the demand.
The “culprit” that caused iPad demand to rise is online courses.
According to Dingding data, since the resumption of class on February 10, Dingding’s “Class at Home” program has opened the “Online Classroom” function to national primary and secondary schools. In more than a month, 140,000 schools, 2.9 million classes are being launched, covering 120 million students in more than 30 provinces across the country. 3.5 million people’s teachers across the country have become anchors.
Uncle Xia, the person in charge of shrimp play technology, defined the iPad series as “productivity before buying, iQiyi after buying”, but the iPad, which was previously positioned as a “restricted entertainment tool” in the family, is becoming “reliable learning.” “Tools”, popular with parents.
Not only is the school’s daily curriculum needs, the resumption of classes also drives students to study after class, which in turn drives the demand for iPad use.
K12 Art Education, a senior education practitioner who has worked for Fang Yuan, deeply understands the “anxiety” of parents. Fang Yuan has received feedback from many parents on the difficulty of purchasing iPads. Due to the special nature of the platform, iPads are required to complete teaching. The device version also has higher requirements, and it needs a new version of iPad, iPad Pro, or iPad mini 2 or higher to support it.
The problem encountered by parents is not out of stock. Delays or non-delivery by major e-commerce platforms only make parents anxious. Fang Yuan and colleagues can only know as much as possible in the community which home appliance platform can ship. Help parents get the source information as soon as possible. And 3 to 4 of every 100 students are unable to complete lessons due to equipment problems.Some families cannot complete the course without an iPad.
Since mid-February, the class has resumed lessons. Fang Yuan found that only 60% of the daily class rate increased rapidly to 85%, but this did not boost sales performance, and even more users who signed up for the trial class did not have equipment And give up listening.
Another reason for the lack of stock also comes from insufficient inventory prepared by distributors everywhere. In December of last year, “Beans Sprouts” has talked to friends in the industry about the new products that Apple will release on March 18. According to the supply chain news, “Beans Sprouts” and other colleagues also intentionally lowered the iPad at hand Series and Macbook Air product line inventory.
“Beans sprout” tells Yiou that the consumption replacement period is around the Spring Festival. Consumers will “buy new but not old” if there is a budget. As a dealer and distributor, no one wants to press Goods, deliberately not to buy goods also became the right choice before the Spring Festival. However, the sudden outbreak prevented distributors from replenishing new products, including failure to respond to old product orders.
But Liang Lei is optimistic about the sales of Apple’s old models, especially the iPad Pro and Macbook Air series updates. Although most users will still choose new models, the launch of new products will accelerate the price reduction of old products. Users are more attractive, which is also an important reason why Liang Lei still maintains the replenishment status of old iPad products.
Educational Intelligent Hardware: The Next Main Battlefield for Technology Companies
Although the tablet market has not returned to its peak in 2015 in recent years, the demand for tablet products has been further driven by the rapid development of education informatization, especially the rapid development of online education in China and the United States.
IDC: China ’s Tablet PC Market Shipment in 2015-2019
According to the latest data released by IDC, a total of 22.41 million tablets were shipped worldwide in 2019, which was popular with the 10.2-inch iPad launched in September 2019. Apple used 8.56 million units with a 38.2% market share Become the world’s largest tablet computer manufacturer, China’s Huawei, Xiaomi, Lenovo respectively with 7.37 million units (32.9%) , 1.23 million units (5.5%) and 760,000 (3.4%) The goods list is two or three or four.
IDC: Top 5 Tablet PC Vendors in China in 2019
In the consumer market, education has become an important reason for the improvement of the tablet PC market. The tablet PC consumer market has changed the decline in 2018 and achieved a year-on-year growth of 6.7% in 2019. And this time the demand for online courses also brought an abnormal impact in the epidemic situation. Perhaps the sales volume that had originally fallen will rise against this trend.
The education market has always been favored by Apple. At the time, Apple CEO Tim Cook (Timothy Donald Cook) has said that since 1978 Apple has been paying more attention to the education market since the beginning of the year. That year, Apple reached an agreement with the Minnesota Computer Association, giving Minnesota students access to 500 Apple II computers.
2018 at Lane University of Technology (Lanetech) At the press conference, Apple ’s iPad is aimed at the education market, and supports Apple Pencil to make this product popular with students and educators. In addition, in enterprise applications, Apple also provides many teaching institutions Management services, including course management Classroom, electronic version of homework software Handdouts, education office software Actiies, etc. With the help of the ClassKit framework, Apple chose to go out of the way of differentiation with PC and opened up a larger consumer-grade market in a to B manner.
Apple co-developers provide comprehensive IT-to-deployment services for the education management market. For the K12 education market, Apple supports the full deployment of devices to cloud services. Education customers can purchase corresponding education equipment according to individual needs. Apple even provides Free basic iCloud storage service. After iPad OS goes online, more developers will use cross-platform to develop educational applications to meet the management needs of educators.
Apple also has hundreds of thousands of education apps. The Apple Store has launched 200,000 education apps in 2018. With more than 20 million developers worldwide, Apple is further expanding its education market.
In mainland China, Apple works with 46 authorized education distributors, which can provide customized solutions for primary and secondary schools and universities. As long as you are a student or a faculty member who is at least 18 years old, you can get preferential purchase rights.
Euou: 2020 Apple China’s 46 authorized education distributors
In order to further open the market, Apple has provided preferential purchase policies for individual and collective education customers from a long time. For example, the iPad Pro official website retail price starts from 6,299 yuan, and education users start from 5,829 yuan. Product lines covered by education offers include Mac, iPa