“Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster today calls the introduction of Apple’s iPhone at Verizon Communications, where general availability started today, ‘an important battle in the war for smartphone market share,’ and he estimates Verizon may sell over 1 million units in the first three days of availability, including 250,000 pre-orders by existing Verizon customers,” Tiernan Ray reports for Barron’s.
“The device went on sale a week ago, on the Web, for those Verizon customers and almost immediately sold out,” Ray reports. “Munster notes the second round of pre-orders, taken yesterday, also sold out quickly. Munster’s been estimating Apple will sell 16.2 million iPhones worldwide this quarter ending in March — 2.9 million at AT&T (T), and 1.5% million at Verizon — but now he thinks that may be too low, given the ramp-up at Verizon.”
Ray reports, “Munster thinks iPhone sales will cannibalize sales of phones using Google’s Android operating system, modeling those phones to take a 1-million-unit hit [and] emphasizes that [even before adding Verizon] Apple’s iOS is half the profits in the handset industry, even though Android phones have been outselling iPhones by units 2 to 3.”
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