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 Stephen Withers turns his gaze on the world of Apple, with
detours into other aspects of IT and communications as they catch his
attention. |
Technology news and Jobs 
Our Blogs Core Dump 'Lost' iPhone call revenue is just a phantom
Our Blogs Core Dump 'Lost' iPhone call revenue is just a phantom | 'Lost' iPhone call revenue is just a phantom |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Wednesday, 30 January 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 2 If you have been partly basing your predictions of Apple's future revenue on the result of multiplying the number of iPhones shipped by your guestimate of the trailing fees from the phone companies, that's your problem, not Apple's. But blaming a business for failing to meet outsiders' estimates is nothing new. Say a company provides 'guidance' that it expects income of $X and market analysts subsequently predict a larger figure of $Y. If the actual result is somewhere between $X and $Y, the company is held to have 'failed' and is 'punished' with a drop in its share price. In some ways, this supposed lost revenue is about as real as the music industry's valuation of unauthorised copying. The various organisations representing the industry try to claim that every copy made represents a lost sale, when that is clearly not the case. So it is with the iPhone. We all know that unlocked iPhones are turning up in countries where Apple does not have a deal with a carrier. Examples include China, Australia and European nations other than the UK, France and Germany. There's no suggestion that iPhones are in short supply, so you can't argue that each one that moves across the borders denies Apple the revenue it would have received indirectly from a customer in the country where it was originally sold. |
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