Kuo: iPhone 11 & unreleased iPhone SE2 to drive 10% YOY growth in Q1 2020

iPhone 11 Pro (Image credit: Rene Ritchie/iMore)

What you need to know

Kuo expects a 10% YOY iPhone sales increase for Q1 2020.
Strong iPhone 11 sales will help.
The arrival of iPhone SE2 is also slated to increase sales.

Ming-Chi Kuo of TF Securities has shared a new forecast for iPhone sales during Q1 of 2020, according to 9to5Mac. That forecast has iPhone sales increasing 10% year-over-year thanks to strong demand for iPhone 11. Kuo believes the unannounced iPhone SE2 will also play a part.

The analyst clearly expects iPhone SE2 to arrive in the first quarter of 2020 in order to count it in this new forecast. The launch of the new phone, combined with strong demand for iPhone 11, may be enough to see the increase Kuo expects.

Breaking things down, the forecast has Apple shipping around 40 million iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max units before the end of this year. That's around three million fewer than iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max during the same period last year, something Kuo puts down to supply constraints. However, iPhone 11 is believed to be performing more strongly than iPhone XR, making up the difference and then some.

It's important to remember that iPhone XR didn't launch intil October 2018, giving iPhone 11 a leg up purely because it will have been on sale an extra few weeks.

The biggest story here may be the belief that iPhone SE2 will be part of this equation. There have been ongoing rumors of its arrival for months. The latest of which has the device looking similar to an iPhone 8, rather than the smaller iPhone 5 form factor so many people continue to enjoy.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.

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