Apple Sold 270,000 iPhones On Launch Weekend
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Richard Baguley Published on July 25, 2007 Comment on this |
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25th July 2007 - Apple has just released their financial results from the second quarter of 2007, which includes the iPhone launch on the 29th. And they claim that they sold 270,000 iPhones from 6pm friday (when the phone was launched) to midnight on sunday, when their second financial quarter ended, with 146,000 of these being activated in the same period. Apple admitted that there had been problems with activating new iPhones to work on the AT&T service, which may go some way to explaining the difference between the sales and activation figures. Plus, many users experienced problems in porting numbers from other providers to AT&T that delayed activating the phone for several days. However, they claimed that these activation problems had now been solved, and were looking to sell their millionth iPhone in September, and 10 million by the end of 2008. That's pretty impressive, especially considering that it took them 2 years to sell their 1 millionth iPod; they are hoping to reach that figure for the iPhone in around 3 months.
The iPhone is far from being Apple's best selling product, though; while they sold 270,000 iPhones, they also sold over 9 million iPods in the quarter. Apple also seems to be in great financial shape; they claim revenues of $5.41 billion for this quarter, with a profit of $818 million, nearly double last year's $72 million profit. And despite the expense of designing and building the iPhone, they claim that they still have several billion in cash available.
Apple is taking a different approach to how they add all of these iPhones to their balance sheet; instead of counting them purely in the quarter that they were sold in, they are accounting for them over 8 quarters. This also makes it easier for them to include the cut of the AT&T subscription fee that they get, as this will run over the 2 years that users commit to when signing up with AT&T for the iPhone. This financial technique (called subscription accounting) means that they get less money up front on the books, but that they can defer the revenue from the contract. And, with billions of dollars of cash in the bank, Apple doesn't really need the money right now.
The details of Apple's results are available here.
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