“During Apple’s fiscal year 2015, the company broke two records — it shipped a record number of iPhones, and its iPhone business generated record revenue, driven by both the surge in iPhone shipments as well as growth in iPhone average selling prices,” Ashraf Eassa writes for The Motley Fool. “Apple shipped more than 231 million iPhones during its fiscal year 2015 and generated more than $155 billion from those shipments.”
“That success was due to the enormous popularity of the company’s then-new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus smartphones, which represented Apple’s first large-screen iPhones. Apple was late to bringing out jumbo-sized iPhones, so when Apple finally delivered what customers had been asking for, it enjoyed an enormous surge in both iPhone unit shipments as well as average selling prices as it satisfied pent-up demand,” Eassa writes. “Since then, Apple has had a hard time matching either record… During Apple’s fiscal year 2018, the company is on track to finally beat the iPhone revenue record that it achieved in fiscal year 2015 thanks to a surge in iPhone average selling prices attributable to the introduction of the premium-priced iPhone X.”
“However, Apple is still likely to fall short of its lifetime iPhone unit shipment record. Indeed, while Apple shipped 135.64 million iPhones during the first half of fiscal 2015, it has only shipped around 129.5 million iPhones in the first half of fiscal year 2018,” Eassa writes. “The company may fall short this year, but it seems there’s a good chance that Apple will finally break its unit shipment record in fiscal 2019. ”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, when the iPhone lineup goes all-modern, no antiquated Home buttons, and decked out with TrueDpeth Camera systems, the unit sales record will fall!
That’s about 43 iPhones manufactured every minute that year.
And a 5G iPhone will definitely be a record breaking cycle!
5G is basically just WiFi: High speed, but low range.
The only products Apple still makes are all in basically duopoly markets.
Global population growing at something like 2% per year.
Isn’t it difficult to sustain a mature established duopoly without setting records most years?
Apple is not the hard working hungry underdog it used to be. Sales are easy and Apple’s glacial pace of product design improvements and spotty quality show they are taking it for granted. Apple is expanding geographically, not by product leadership.
Stuck with my iPhone 7 Plus last fall because I didn’t want a smaller width iPhone X. Will buy the max storage 6.5” iPhone X Plus SIM-Free in Oct-Nov. So I count for one who didn’t buy in fiscal 2018 – first year I didn’t buy one since iPhone 3 – but will buy the most expensive model in fiscal 2019.
It’s not saying much. I Apple sells just one more phone this year, it’s breaking records.
I agree with Eassa. Just factoring historic unit growth rates since the market achieved saturation Apple should sell 224 million iPhones during FY2019.
Add in 5G connectivity (a really big deal), the power of the A-12 processor and you could easily add another 8 million units to the all-time high unit sales (new high 232 million).