Apple shares under pressure on a report that it’s halving its iPhone X production

Thomas Peter | Reuters

An attendee uses a new iPhone X during a presentation for the media in Beijing, China October 31, 2017.

Apple’s stock dipped slightly in premarket trading Monday after a report said it would halve production for the iPhone X in the first three months of 2018.

The tech giant told suppliers it would cut its production target for the phone from 40 million units to 20 million, following slower-than-expected sales in the year-end holiday shopping period in Europe, the U.S. and China, the Nikkei reported Monday.

The company’s latest phone was released to the market in November for $999, and includes 64 gigabytes of storage. A model with 256 GB of storage was released simultaneously for $1,150.

It is the firm’s first phone to be equipped with an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screen.

Apple is expected to maintain a total production target of 30 million units for lower-priced models like the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone 7, according to the Nikkei report.

Shares of Apple were down by around 0.4 percent in U.S. premarket trade. Apple was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.

The share price of a number of semiconductors who supply chips to the corporation appeared to mostly shrug off the news, with Austria-based AMS trading more than 17 percent higher after raising its revenue forecast and Dialog Semiconductor rising more than 2 percent.