iPhone 3G not sold 1 million to customers
Filed under: Cell Phone Information, Cell Phones | By: Daniel
Posted on: July 16, 2008 | 3 Comments
This week we heard an amazing announcement from Apple about the iPhone 3G selling one million phones in a few days, we now hear this might not be to end customers.
When you think of 1 million sales, its simple and you think that Apple has sold a million phones. Well Beta news claim this might not be true, yes the phones have left Apple but could be with AT&T and not the end customer for at least another 2 weeks.
Is it right claiming one million iPhone 3G’s have been sold if it turns out they have not been bought by the end user?
Financial analyst, Gene Munster has said that the amount of 3G iPhones sold by last Monday would have been around 500,000, if this is true, where does the 1 million come from?
Gene Munster said that the numbers were projected by ringing stores and finding out how many phones were being activated each hour, once this calculation was worked out, it will then take another 17 days to hit 1 million iPhone 3G sales.
Looking at past iTunes press releases and this one, Apple seems overly optimistic with these announcements?
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well its said that most stores selling the iphone are sold out. and with the thousands of AT&T and Apple stores around, the number of phones sold to customer may be up to 1 million. however all my knowladge comes from news articles and ive done no real research, so i cannot bash you on this claim :p
Well, I purchased the iPhone at the carphone warehouse on Friday 11th and have been advised not to expect delivery until Friday 25th.
What amazes me is between o2, Apple and the carphone warehouse not enough units were prepared for July 08. What a shambles!!!!
Of course Apple’s figure includes some iPhones sold to carriers, but not yet sold to users, as did last year’s first weekend 270,000. But distribution has been micromanaged so that carriers have very little unsold stock. Gene Munster surveyed only US stores, at the start of availability, when there were teething problems with activation, and scaled from there. He also estimated very low numbers for all other countries, for reasons that are not clear to me.
It seems to me that at an absolute minimum 750,000 must have been in the hands of end users at the end of the weekend, and at most 250,000 with carriers.
We had exactly the same story last year, although GeneMunster didn’t have an embarassingly wrong precise forecast that time.