Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP), today released analysis of the results from its research on Apple for the fiscal quarter that ended December 30, 2018.
CIRP analysis indicates the iPhone US installed base reached 189 million units as of December 30, 2018, compared to 185 million units at the end of the September 2018 quarter and 166 million units at the end of the December 2017 quarter (Chart 1). CIRP bases this estimate on an estimated global sales of 62 million iPhones, which is in turn derived from an estimated Average Selling Price (ASP) of $839 and Apple, Inc. disclosed iPhone revenues.
As of December 30, 2018, the installed base grew 2% relative to the September 2018 quarter and 14% relative to the December 2018 quarter. One year ago, the iPhone US installed base grew 5% over the prior quarter and 19% over the prior year.
CIRP bases this estimate of US installed base on an estimated global sales of 62 million iPhones. This is in turn derived from an estimated Average Selling Price (ASP) of $839 and Apple, Inc. disclosed iPhone revenues.
“Based on an estimated ASP of $839, and Apple’s disclosed iPhone revenues of about $52 billion, we estimate Apple sold approximately 62 million iPhones, of all models and storage capacities, globally in the quarter,” Mike Levin, Partner and Co-Founder of CIRP, said in a statement. “We then translate this estimate of global unit sales into our estimate of US unit sales and its implications for the US installed base.”
CIRP bases its findings on its survey of 500 US Apple customers, surveyed from December 31, 2018 – January 10, 2019 that purchased an iPhone, iPad, or Mac in the US in October-December 2018 period.
Source: Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, LLC
MacDailyNews Take: Inexorably, those whose who’ve settled for inferior Android wares eventually upgrade to real iPhones.
I’m mostly sure CIRP is taking into account more than sales and revenue of iPhones to calculate an increase of 4M users in the US installed base. However it is not clear if they take into account trade-ins, or upgrades from breakage or older generation iPhone (collectively ‘replacement’ making no positive base increase) vs a completely ‘new’ user to the user base.
Assuming a 1:1 iPhone to user, that is about 50% of the us population. Not bad for a device that has no physical keyboard.