What you need to know
- Apple held its Q4 2021 earnings call today.
- The company revealed it experienced $6 billion in supply constraints during the quarter.
- The constraints impacted the Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
Earlier today, Apple hosted its Q4 2021 earnings call. During the call, Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed that it, along with virtually every company in the world, has been unable to avoid supply constraints.
In response to a question from Shannon Cross from Cross Research, Cook revealed that the company experienced $6 billion in supply constraints in the fourth quarter of 2021. According to Cook, the constraints affected the production of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
If you look at Q4 for a moment, we had about $6 billion in supply constraints, and it affected the iPhone, the iPad and the Mac. We had — there were two causes of them for Q4. One was the chip shortages that you've heard a lot about from many different companies through the industry. And the second was COVID-related manufacturing disruptions in Southeast Asia. The second of those, the COVID disruptions, have improved materially across October to where we currently are. And so for this quarter, we think that the primary cause of supply-chain-related shortages will be the chip shortage.It will affect — it is affecting, I should say, pretty much most of our products currently. But from a demand point of view, demand is very robust. And so part of this is the demand also is very strong. But we believe that by the time we finished the quarter that the constraints will be larger than the $6 billion that we experienced in Q4.
You can read about Apple's fourth-quarter earnings in our coverage here.
