“Blowout sales of the new iPhone 5S and 5C, but particularly the former, have shown that the naysayers were way off,” Roger Kay reports for Forbes.
“With 9 million phones flying off the shelves in the first weekend, Apple was looking more like the company Steve Jobs began resurrecting in 1997,” Kay reports. “Sticking to a cautiously high-end (read: profitable) strategy, CEO Tim Cook placed the new products in market with unerring precision. Investors cheered on Monday. Apple shares are up $20, or 4.4%, so far today.”
Kay reports, “Despite mocking the iPhone 5C colors on Twitter, Nokia — really Microsoft — could not mask the fact that Apple made more revenue in one weekend of sales than the entire enterprise value of Nokia.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Apple destroys smartphone sales record: First weekend iPhone sales top nine million units – September 23, 2013
Apple: iPhone 5 sales exceed five million units in first weekend; demand exceeded initial supply – September 24, 2012
iPhone 4S destroys sales record; over 4 million units sold in first weekend – October 17, 2011
iPhone 4 sales top 1.7 million in first 3 days; Steve Jobs apologizes for not having enough supply – June 28, 2010
Apple CEO Steve Jobs back on the job: Over 1 million iPhone 3G S units sold in first three days – June 22, 2009
Apple sells one million iPhone 3G units in first weekend – July 14, 2008
How many times does Apple have to prove them wrong?
Apparently, every time.
Reminds me of the childhood game “King of the Mountain.”
Unfortunately, more times than we all care for. It is obvious that “the critics” are not really critics. They are haters who wish nothing but the worst for Apple. What they fail to realize is that if Apple was not innovating, what clone company product that they buy today would exist? They would have nobody to copy from. I can only wonder what the so-called analysts are quietly saying about the so-called “saturation of the smartphone market.” They were the one’s claiming that since Samsung, Motorola and HTC couldn’t sell their product, neither could Apple because in their eyes, Apple was equivalent to the other brands. Yeah right!!
“CEO Tim Cook placed the new products in market with unerring precision” — that has to be the reason for the gargantuan sales numbers. No other explanation is even credible.
Apple under producing the number of iPhones for sale hardly qualifies as “unerring precision”.
Troll.
A fun little chart that strikes the eye:
http://www.asymco.com/2013/09/23/iphones-5c-and-5s-launch-performance-illustrated/
Well struck …
i still want to know how many 5c were sold and how many 5s. This will really show people just how popular the 5c is.
“According to a report issued Sunday by Localytics, a Boston-based mobile analytics firm, Apple sold 3.4 times as many units of the higher-priced iPhone 5S as the 5C during the first weekend of U.S. sales,’ Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.”
The above is from an earlier article that was posted here.
My question is, if news of a quarterly loss at Amazon can increase their share price over the long term, why doesn’t Apple’s beating the street’s estimates of iPhone sales qualify for a bump that lasts for longer than a couple of hours. I know they’re still up, but they started the day up quite a lot higher than they are now. I have no idea where they’ll close, but why can’t this incredible news give them a bump that lasts for at least $100/share without the ups and downs throughout the day?
It’s because of their continuing, fundamental misunderstanding of the sustaining business model that propels Apple. Until they grasp that, they can’t see a future for Apple earnings. Apple is too different, therefore inexplicable.
Apple will never be the BFF of Wall Street. Simply because Apple’s soul is free and clear from the strangle hold of WS. Until the management team gets brainwash one day and say, “we gotta do the stuff we do so that stocks will go up up up, not stuff to make people happy and love our products”, the stocks will always get hammered by WS.
They say Apple’s future is less certain since it amounts to nothing more than a one-trick pony.
In truth it’s more like a 9M trick pony!
The secret is that it’s a sequence of one-trick ponies, each one with a better trick than the last, and a hell of a stud. It won’t end until they run out of wiling mares.
Like equine breeding, Apple’s world is closed, obsessive, and secretive. It also produces the likes of Secretariat.
What, “the naysayers were way off”. Isn’t 9 million vs. 5 million only a tiny 80% higher! “way off” should be followed with “who is paying these naysayers” and “where did they get their inside information this time?”
BOOOOYAAAHHHHHH!
I wonder if this includes, what it would be with online orders? I ordered mine at 12:05 PDT (it’s coming from China, I see today!) and I’m sure that was a large number.
9 million units sold. Apple can’t charge you until they ship the device.
People keep harping on the 5c.
The 5c is/was a non-factor.
It was the vehicle to keep Samsung complacent and unaware of Apple’s 64-bit strategy until it was too late.
I do not think it is a “non-factor”, I think it was meant for a very specific subset of buyers that were priced out of the 5S. It is not going for the very bottom end of the smartphone market, because that market is not going to provide additional revenue aside from the purchase and whatever Apple gets from the contract with the carrier. In particular, it seems aimed at emerging markets, which have the most potential for expansion. Hopefully 5C buyers will at some point graduate to the flagship phone.
I do not see low 5C sales as a problem since they seemed intended as a complementary product to the 5S. The ratio 5S to 5C sales in fact bodes well for Apple – demand for the new flagship iPhone is still extremely high.
My family is completely ordinary where trends are concerned — something happens as a trend and I can look at my family and say, “Yup.” I wish my family was a leading indicator, but we aren’t. My 20 year-old daughter wants a green 5c (and can afford a 5s) because she’s tired of not having a cute phone (white iPhone 4). If her position is representative of a trend, there may be more to the 5c story than simply affordability. My 14 year-old originally wanted a blue 5c but after seeing one in the real world decided the color is just too “there” (in your face?!) and so is looking at the 5s and the requisite additional baby-sitting jobs she’ll need to find.
Now if the iPhone 6 doesn’t clear 9 million upon it’s release, the iPhone and AAPL are DOOMED!
I am wondering just how many they could have sold past 9 million were there more in stock, especially the gold 5s. It seems across the world that most want the gold one…that means to me at least a couple million more added to the 9 million.
Undoubtedly the could have sold more, but demand satisfaction is something you absolutely want to manage when you’re in this for the long haul. That demand will get fulfilled and it will be reported late January as the December quarter closes. And it will be an important addition to the “holiday” sales wherein Apple can report huge numbers again. Thus Apple gets to stretch continued good news out over time rather than just having a single big — really big — weekend story. The stories today wouldn’t be materially different if Apple had tripled or quadrupled or quintupled the first weekend sales results: They’d still be “iPhone 5c/s first weekend sales set new records” and there’d be fewer follow-on headlines as order fulfillment catches up.
Gold: The new black.
That isn’t what the arbiters of culture were saying a week ago. “Gold is outré, a vanished symbol of decadence and excess,” they intoned.
I guess the rest of the world didn’t get the memo.
Does MDN believe continuing to run stories of how well the 5S did in sales somehow hides the truth of the 5C. The 5C sold about 1.9 million units and Apple isn’t saying where those 5C sells occurred.
Apple did an excellent job with the 5S, but they miscalculated with the 5C in terms of price. If the 5S hadn’t been sold out so quickly, the 5S sells would have been higher. And then you have to wonder if not for the fact that Apple ran out of 5S, did people buy the 5C because they didn’t want to wait weeks for a 5S?
Apple is not, so far as I’ve seen, telling how the 4S is selling. The sales term for that is “run rate” in that no matter what you do, really, they’ll just continue to sell. So regardless of the 5c/s mix, Apple is very likely still selling far far more iPhones right now than a month ago.
Tell us something new. Critics are uninformed and in the same state of denial as Steve Balmer.
A couple of interesting points here. In the past, Apple has given sales numbers based on iPhones in the hands of customers, and not online orders that hadn’t shipped or been received yet.
If that’s the case this time, then HOLY COW, because I’d bet there are a TON of people like me who camped out for the coveted Gold only to be turned away and then go home and order it online for an October delivery.
It’s one thing to sell 9 million, it’s another thing to sell out at 9 million and have bazillions more in uncounted online orders.
Also, guestimates are coming in for the 5C at around 1/3 to 1/5 the sales of the 5S. To me, that’s an impressive figure because that represents up to 3 million iPhones (again possibly not including non-delivered online orders). That’s a HUGE number when you put it in context.
The up to 3 million estimate is great for two reasons, one, it not too high, and not cannibalizing the iPhone 5S. Secondly, it’s not an amount of sales over a period of time (like a quarter or year). Meaning that people saw the iPhone 5C, and were set on getting it, even waiting in line for it. This is different from the “last year’s model” where people wanted to get an iPhone and just got the cheapest one available. In other words, the strategy is working, the iPhone 5C is attracting new customers while at the same time maintaining a healthy margin and not cannibalizing the iPhone 5S.
If you’re right, then when the smoke clears total sales will have swamped the levees and the breakwaters. I tend to agree…we haven’t seen the end of the carnage yet. May we all all enjoy the spectacle of pampered overseers, viziers, and scribes getting their comeuppance in this, perhaps the second-greatest story ever told. Not for nothing did the Pharisees call it the Jesus phone.