“This week Apple announced that iTunes has 575 million accounts. This is the 8th update (that I know of) over the last four years,” Horace Dediu writes for Asymco. “An iTunes account generates about $3.2/month in transactions. Put another way, during the last year, an average of $40/yr of economic value is generated by every iTunes account.”
“The practice of valuing a company by the rate of spending of its customer base is not uncommon, especially when the customer base is relatively loyal,” Dediu writes. “for a number of years — from 2009 until late 2012 — Apple’s users were valued (implicitly by the stock market) as likely to create a net present value of about $1200 in earnings. The current value is about a third of that, or $440 in earnings. Today’s expectation is therefore that each current customer will buy the equivalent of 1.8 iPhones. And nothing more, ever. A few months ago it was expected that each customer would buy three times as much.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
[Attribution: Forbes. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]