According to a survey conducted by industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple has revised its hardware shipment projections downward for this year, attributing the adjustment to a prevailing memory shortage. Nevertheless, Apple will strategize its processor production at TSMC, basing it on the anticipated memory supply levels at least three months in advance. This approach deviates from the practice of having TSMC manufacture a large volume of semi-finished products beforehand. This does not imply that TSMC will refrain from producing and stockpiling semi-finished products in advance altogether. However, if the bottleneck does not lie with TSMC, there is little practical advantage in pre-stockpiling, and Apple would have no incentive to incur additional costs for TSMC to undertake such measures. Kuo emphasized that although the memory supply is indeed constrained, there is no likelihood of a scenario where "TSMC initially stockpiles semi-finished products worth $1 billion and then waits anxiously for memory components to arrive for packaging." As two of the world's leading companies in terms of execution efficiency, TSMC and Apple maintain a close collaborative relationship in supply chain management, making such dramatic developments highly improbable.