Apple sold half a million iPhones?

Posted Jul 2nd 2007 8:00AM by Melly Alazraki
Filed under: Analyst Reports, Forecasts, Products and Services, Consumer Experience, Apple Inc (AAPL), Marketing and Advertising, AT and T (T), iPhone

Did Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) sell half a million iPhones over the weekend? That, of course, depends on who you ask. If you recall, TheStreet.coms Scott Moritz did his own math last week estimating 392,000 iPhones sold in stores, not online, which could generate revenue of $216 million on the evening of June 29.

Well, according to Bloomberg, analysts' estimates ranged from 50,000-200,000 units heading into the weekend. According to estimates, Apple has indeed managed to meet analysts' top prediction, selling as many as 200,000 on the first day after the debut of the iPhone alone. We also know from many media sources and from AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) itself that many of its stores were sold out of the iPhone within 24 hours. Trip Chowdhry, a Global Equities analyst, says AT&T sold 72,000 units while Apple sold 128,000 units on the first day.

According to CNET, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimates Apple sold 500,000 units over the weekend. Munster had said before Apple would sell 200,000 units on Friday and Saturday, but amended his estimates over the weekend, saying the iPhone was available in all Apple stores on Saturday, and in 84% of the stores on Sunday.

It wasn't clear if the 200,000 estimate for the first 24 hours, or the 500,000 estimate for the weekend include online sales.

Another interesting point brought up by most media reporting is that shoppers opted for the more expensive ($599) 8GB model than the cheaper ($499) 4GB one. Many customers (as many as half) were also new to AT&T.
As for CEO Steve Jobs, who had predicted the iPhone will become Apple's third main business, his goal is to sell 10 million iPhones in 2008, capturing 1% of the global market for handsets. Most signs indicate Jobs is well on his way to reaching that goal, and possibly exceeding it. Apple may have underestimated demand as stores were sold out of the phone and manufacturing boosted only last week.

Update: CNNMoney has more from Gene Munster's report and the Associate Press brings a few other analysts opinions:

Goldman Sachs upped 2008 iPhone sales forecast from 10.5 million to 12 million.
JPMorgan Securities on the other hand cut the iPhone sales estimate to 9.9 million from 12.2 million.
And Lehman Brothers thinks Apple will need to cut prices later this year to appeal to mainstream consumers.

Tags: aapl, apple, iphone

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

7-02-2007 @ 4:33PM

joseph said...

AT&T's "seemingly" grand deal to give DSL-lite customers 3 times the upload speed,as FCC stipulation to te merger, is ALL smoke and mirrors...

Currently, in the Bellsouth Region with service far worse than the old Ameritech Region and technical knowledge non-existant to resolve the problems.. It appears that ATT is attempting to offer icewater in the middle of the desert... which is a meaningless jester to someone who knows better.....

Personally, I've spoken to Johnathan Pittman (404-499-5872) in the Executive Office of ATT who concedes to the network WAN troubles of BellSouth surrounding their DSL implementation, but states ATT will do nothing to correct the ongoing scam of its customers... Basically, it is this... ATT offers these greater speeds, but realistically will not provide such offered speeds to the customer, due to inadequate network facilities to support the required bandwidth..

Get out of ATT stock while you still can..... The Bellsouth acquistion was a bigger bite than SBC/AT&T can chew.... Stock will drop 20% before there is ANY light !!!

7-02-2007 @ 4:37PM

joseph said...

7-11-2007 @ 8:04PM

Andre NYC said...

Whatever early problems with ATT, the iPhone is posed to be the next iPod success. Forget about internet access - just as a plain cellphone it has the useability that one would have expected years ago.

I stopped by the 5th ave store, last saturday and was really pleasantly not surprised that the iPhone *finally* is the cellphone/other portable that is really easy to use and powerful enough to bring the whole internet info - without a manual.

And my casual inquiries with the early buyers confirm that unless someone ( RIM, Nokia, Microsoft ?? long shots ) can pull a viable alternative with enough oomph to pull in a telco into agreement, this is it.

See for yourselves some of the early buyers:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nycandre/sets/72157600604039269/