Apple hits 10 million iPhone sales!

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 07 October 2008 03:25

Business IT - Technology

Despite naysaying by Wall Street soothsayers, there's evidence that Apple has already sold 10 million iPhones this year. The news is a kick in the pants of the skeptics in the anti-Apple crowd.

When Apple announced the iPhone in January 2007, CEO Steve Jobs said the goal was to sell 10 million units during 2008, the first full calendar year of sales. Various market analysts have been tipping significantly lower figures.

Now it seems the joke may be on them.

Since August 1, a project has been under way to estimate the iPhone 3G production rate by tracking the IMEI numbers of recently sold handsets. The IMEI uniquely identifies any GSM/3G mobile, and because part of the code should be allocated serially it can be used to determine the number manufactured of that model.

The project's results are summarised in a Google Docs spreadsheet and the latest estimate is that 9.19 million have been produced.

'Produced' isn't the same as 'sold'. But here's an encapsulated version of the reasoning applied by Andy Zaky and Turley Muller at Bullish Cross: even if 1.5 million iPhones are unsold to allow for production rejects, inventory, etc - and that's a very generous allowance - that leaves 7.6 million.

Add the 2.4 million original iPhones already sold in 2008, and there's the 10 million iPhones.

But it's only early October, which leaves nearly three months - including the Christmas/holiday buying season - to go. The project's current estimate is that by the end of the year production could exceed 17 million.

That might be a bit optimistic - see page two.