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Title: The Case of the Missing iPhones
Author: Alan Lenton
Date: 28 January 2008 05:39:07 +00:00 or Mon, 28 January 2008 05:39:07 +00:00
Summary: [28-01-2008] Apple's iPhone seems to be a hit with a reported 3.7 million sold last year. Or perhaps not...
Body: Apple seem to be doing pretty well these days with Macs and gadgets like iPhone flying out the door like there is no tomorrow. Or are they? Well yes, but in the case of the iPhone the real question is where are they flying to?
You see, AT&T, who are the US carrier for the iPhone produced some interesting figures at an earning conference call on Thursday. It seems that AT&T had two million iPhone customers at the end of the year.
Two million...
The problem is that, a couple of days earlier, Apple reported it has 'sold' 3.7 million iPhones. So where are the missing 1.7 million iPhones? Well, some of them have obviously been sold in Europe. The carriers involved there are talking about 200,000 in the UK (but from personal observations I'd suspect that the final figures will be lower), and 100,000 each in France and Germany.
That's a total of 400,000. We are still 1.3 million iPhones short. So where are they? One possibility is that some of them have been doctored to work with other carriers. Doing so is not that easy since the latest upgrade, and very difficult to do in software. Let's be very, very, generous and assume that 250,000 iPhones purchased are being used with other services (this was Apple's estimate last year - I would be surprised if the number exceeded 50,000). That gives us 670,000 - two thirds of a million - missing iPhones.
The suggestion is that they haven't been sold at all, they are sitting on retailers' shelves. Not only that, but Apple has been ramping up production, so by now it's likely that there are even more sitting on dealers' shelves. This fact that hasn't been missed by Wall Street. In spite of its soaring Mac sales and a great holiday quarter, Apple's stock has lost 15% of its value this week...
Someone, somewhere, can clearly do sums and get 2+2 to equal -670,000!
http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9857622-37.html?part=rss&subj=
news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
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