What rubbish is this? Pretty sure that Apple's shipment numbers are higher. 74,5 millions iPhones are actual units sold, not units shipped to stores et al. Way to mix up numbers!
It's the same thing. When Apple says "sold", they mean "shipped to stores".
That's also what analysts usually mean when they cite either "shipments" or "sales".
Unless they explictly say so, they are
not talking about "sold through to end user".
Unfortunately, Samsung ships many phones that sit in warehouses and on retailer's shelves. Apple can't keep iPhones in the stores and sells every single iPhone instantly.
Actually, on a quarterly basis that's only true about half the time. The other half, store inventories increase because retailers have bought more than they could sell that quarter.
And overall, the total of such channel inventory rises every year. Here's an older chart of Apple's increases:
The predicted future lines are pretty accurate, as (according to Apple) there are currently over 16 million iPhones sitting in store inventories, and around 5 million iPads.
At the end of the previous quarter they had 200,000 in stock which is much less than their target. Last year at the end of the quarter there were 1.1 million in stock.
You misread their statements. Those aren't totals, but relative shifts. I.e. it was 200K less, and 1.1 million more. See previous response.
Aren't we getting our history wrong here a bit? If Apple hadn't developed the iPhone, there would be no Galaxy phones. They only started getting popular when Samsung started copying the iPhone 3GS.
On the contrary, Samsung's sales didn't take off until they STOPPED looking so similar, and started to differentiate themselves.
And in the smartphone market, it's tied with the phone vendor that makes models for every segment of the market, with just a handful of models that are/were mostly top of the line when they originally came out.
Yep, it's amazing how Apple is able to keep their ASP up. Selling bigger phones at this moment in China really helped, but that dynamic could change:
It'll be interesting to see if their China momentum can continue in 2015, now that China's carriers are under government mandate to cut back on subsidies. Of course, Apple could offer their own loan programs.
Who thought a decade ago that Apple would be such a game changer in the mobile phone industry? Makes me think that Motorola ROKR (this came out in 2005) was just a clever ruse to let everyone get their guards down.
Heh. I think Jobs was so embarrassed at how the ROKR turned out, he felt he had to make up for it with something spectacular. Thus the iPhone
