“Last fall, Google’s Motorola group unveiled its Moto X and Apple released its middle-tier iPhone 5c,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider. “Across the board, pundits and reporters portrayed the 5c as a grave mistake that got everything wrong while lavishing Google’s Moto X with praise. Why were they so incredibly wrong?”
“While we don’t have exact sales numbers for either model, it is now clear that iPhone 5c was a remarkable success, not just as 2013’s second most popular smartphone of the holiday season (after Apple’s top of the line iPhone 5s), but also in its intended strategic roles as both an mid-market smartphone and a compelling Android alternative,” Dilger writes. “Speaking to analysts during Apple’s Q2 earnings conference call, chief executive Tim Cook stated that 69 percent of iPhone 5c buyers were new to iPhone, while 60 percent had switched from an Android phone.”
“Apple managed to pull off something that had previously seemed completely impossible: it continued to sell premium, luxury class $650 iPhones at prices three times higher than the volume sales of the overall smartphone market, without making significant concessions on either margins and profitability or, more importantly, without giving up valuable market share,” Dilger writes. “Despite all the media pampering for Google, the reality in this case was that Motorola lost over $700 million for Google in just the last six months of Moto X sales.”
Much more in the full article here.