AllThingsD » figures

Windows Phone 7 Shipments Topped Two Million Units Last Quarter

Ina Fried — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 18:13:47 +0000

It’s still not totally clear how quickly they are selling to consumers, but Microsoft says that more than two million Windows Phone 7 devices have now shipped to cellphone carriers as of the end of December.

“We’re still in the early stages,” Microsoft Senior Product Manager Greg Sullivan told Mobilized in a phone interview on Wednesday. “When people use this phone, they really, really like it.”

Back in December, Microsoft said that 1.5 million Windows Phone 7 devices had shipped to carriers.

AT&T, which carries the broadest lineup of Windows Phone 7 models among the U.S. carriers, declined to give out specific sales figures, but said that sales have been steadily growing since launch and that 90 percent of customers said they would recommend a Windows Phone to others.

“We believe this shows that Windows Phone has a bright future in an intensively competitive space,” an AT&T spokesman told Mobilized.

LG had less-nice things to say, with an executive telling a mobile enthusiast site that early sales weren’t what it had hoped. “From an industry perspective we had a high expectation, but from a consumer point of view the visibility is less than we expected,” LG’s James Choi told Pocket-lint.

Sales are an important measure of success over the long term, but perhaps not even the best indicator of the platform’s long-term success, Sullivan said.

“One of the key ways that we’ll measure success of Windows Phone is did we ship a phone people love,” he said, pointing to its customer-satisfaction data, which said that 93 percent of early customers are “satisfied” or “very satisfied,” adding, “That’s a really great number.”

Guess What? Apple Now Takes in More for Each iPhone Than for iPad

Ina Fried — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 13:30:21 +0000

Although the consumer pays anywhere from two to three times more for an iPad than for an iPhone, Apple actually takes in more revenue, on average, for each iPhone sold than for the larger tablet.

The difference, of course, is that the iPad is sold unsubsidized, while phone carriers typically pick up a good chunk of the cost of the iPhone–money they earn back a little at a time on each monthly phone bill.

But, when you look at what Apple gets in revenue per unit, Apple now gets slightly more revenue, on average, from the iPhone than it does from the iPad.

On Tuesday’s conference call with analysts, Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook said Apple’s average revenue per iPhone is about $625, while the average iPad revenue is closer to $600.

The figure for the iPhone has been growing in recent quarters and is up from an average of $595 six months ago. By contrast, average iPad selling prices have dropped, from about $640 in the April-to-June quarter to around $600 in the just-reported October-to-December quarter.

It will be interesting to see whether the current trends continue and how the numbers shift around when Apple introduces the next iPad and iPhone.

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Why Verizon’s iPhone Won’t Be So Bad for RIM

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 17:29:28 +0000

It was about a year ago I was talking with Charles Wolf, the analyst at Needham and Co. in New York who covers both Apple and Research In Motion. At the time he promised that the day Verizon picked up the iPhone he would downgrade RIM to “sell.” I called him this morning to ask if that were still true. His answer? No, he’s not planning to downgrade RIM even though Verizon is expected to announce its first iPhone tomorrow.

A year ago, when Wolf first made that statement, he was right. An iPhone on Verizon would have been a severe blow to Research In Motion. That it will only amount to a sting this year says a lot about how RIM’s business has improved and how its revenue base has become more diverse in the year or so since.

RIM doesn’t disclose the identities of its biggest carrier partners, but it does disclose how much the top three contribute to overall sales, though it’s not hard to figure out that Verizon has traditionally been its biggest customer. A year ago, Verizon’s sales of BlackBerry devices contributed 25 percent of RIM’s overall sales, while the next two largest customers contributed 13 percent and 10 percent, respectively. At least one of those was AT&T.

Today the picture’s different. RIM’s biggest customer–and it may still be Verizon–accounted for only 12 percent of sales in the quarter ended November, while number two and number three each accounted for 9 percent.

RIM’s growth outside its top three countries–the U.S., the U.K. and Canada–has also picked up. According to figures from IDC, in 2007 RIM relied on North America for more than three quarters of its sales. As of the third quarter of 2010, that figure was down to less than 48 percent. And in a lot of these markets carriers don’t subsidize the phone as aggressively as U.S. carriers do, and so RIM ends up having an advantage on price: $250 or so versus $500 or $600 for an iPhone. RIM is also seeing strong growth in its prepaid business outside North America. During its Dec. 16 earnings call, CEO Jim Balsillie said prepaid sales in the U.K. had grown by 245 percent year-over-year.

Then there’s Android. Verizon threw a lot of weight behind Google’s Android platform last year and has been marketing it heavily all year. The results have been mixed. A study by ITG Investment Research last year suggested that Android didn’t give Verizon the competitive bump it had hoped for versus AT&T. Meanwhile, RIM has in the last year moved closer to AT&T and in August launched the BlackBerry Torch with that carrier, though it didn’t go as well as had been hoped.

It’s not like RIM isn’t going to take some damage from the iPhone. RIM shares are down this morning more than 1 percent. But for RIM it could have been much worse. In June, when Bloomberg News reported that Verizon planned to bring the iPhone to its network, I covered the story of how investors freaked out and lopped more than 6 percent off RIM’s valuation. Now investors seem to understand that it’s likely to hurt RIM’s overall share of the smartphone market, but it won’t be the disaster that it would have been a year ago.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t seen it already, make sure you watch the interview Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher did with RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis at D: Dive Into Mobile in December.

[ See post to watch video ]

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Worldwide IT Spending Growth Speeds Up, Gartner Says

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 15:48:55 +0000

Research firm Gartner has released its latest forecast for worldwide IT spending in the coming year, and at first glance it looks like good news for tech companies across the board.

The good news is that Gartner has revised its outlook upward. Companies and governments will spend $3.6 trillion on IT this year, which is more than the prior $3.4 trillion forecast, amounting to growth of 5.1 percent. Sounds great, right?

Yes, but it’s complicated, especially from the U.S. point of view. The weak dollar makes the figures look a little better than they are. In 2010, Gartner says, IT spending grew 2.2 percent, but more than half of that–1.6 percent–can be attributed to the devaluation of the dollar against other currencies. Companies and governments spending other currencies can get more dollars for their money, and so this tends to inflate the appearance of growth, Gartner’s Richard Gordon told me.

A weak dollar is generally good news for U.S. companies that do a lot of global business. U.S. products and services look more attractive to non-U.S. buyers. But in cases like this, U.S. companies end up paying more for items that get imported and for raw materials.

That’s not to say there isn’t actual growth. Gartner says spending is picking up fastest on telecom equipment, with computing hardware and enterprise software following close behind.

Spending on discretionary items like IT services and consulting is coming back the slowest. When the economic crisis hit in late 2008 and early 2009 these were the first items on the chopping block, and spending on them is only now beginning to make a comeback.

Microsoft "Happy" With Windows Phone 7 Sales

Ina Fried — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 20:26:46 +0000

Windows Phone 7 has been on the market for a month now, but Microsoft has steadfastly refused to give out any concrete sales numbers.

Onstage at D: Dive Into Mobile on Tuesday, Microsoft Vice President Joe Belfiore told Walt Mossberg that it was just too soon to give the numbers. (Mind you, Microsoft hasn’t had a similar problem touting figures for its equally new Kinect product.) In a backstage interview, Belfiore again declined to give specifics, but did say that the company is pleased with the phone sales figures, even if it won’t quantify them.

“We’re very happy with the rate of sales given the fact we’ve taken such a significant reset from Windows Mobile to a brand-new Windows Phone,” Belfiore told Mobilized after his onstage appearance. “We need people to get reacquainted with what we’re offering.”

In the video portion of the backstage interview, embedded below, I tried to pin Belfiore down a little further, asking whether Steve Ballmer smiles or winces when he sees the numbers.

“I think we’re all feeling pretty good,” he replied.

Belfiore also confirmed that a software update early next year (the same one that will bring copy and paste) will pave the way for Sprint and Verizon to also start selling the phone. Microsoft had to make a bunch of trade-offs in order to get the product out this year–one of which was delaying support for CDMA networks. As a result, the phone is only available in the U.S. on AT&T and T-Mobile.

“Having Windows Phone on Verizon and Sprint will be a very important thing,” Belfiore said. “There are a large number of users on those networks that like the service they are getting from their carriers.”

[ See post to watch video ]

Internet Advertising Rebounds to Set Record

Voices — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 16:45:22 +0000

Revenue from Internet advertising reached a record $6.4 billion in the third quarter, according to figures released today from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. That’s a 17 percent jump from the same quarter last year, when revenues were just starting to climb out of a sharp slump.

The Q3 Mobile Numbers: It's All About Apple and Android

Voices — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 21:22:25 +0000

Gartner’s latest figures on worldwide mobile phone sales came out today, showing no change in the market’s major story lines, and that’s good news for Apple and Google’s Android. Total mobile phone sales for Q3 were up 35 percent year-over-year, and smartphone sales were up 96 percent. Among device makers, leaders Nokia, Samsung and LG saw continued share erosion, while Apple climbed past RIM into fourth place. Among smartphone operating systems, Android captured 25.5 percent of the market, up from a mere 3.5 percent a year earlier.

Palm Sold 300,000 Pres in June

John Paczkowski — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:10:16 +0000

During its post-earnings conference call last Thursday, Palm refused to say how many Pre handsets have been sold to date. Or how many it believes it will sell in the first quarter of production. The company would say only, in the words of CEO Jon Rubinstein, that “sales have been strong and growing.” So until Palm (PALM) provides specific Pre sales figures, we have only the estimates of analysts with which to gauge the device’s impact on Palm’s moribund smartphone franchise.

And the latest estimates, from Edward Snyder at Charter Equity Research, suggest that the impact is great. Sources in the manufacturing and retail channels tell Snyder that Palm may have sold as many as 300,000 Pres in June and 70,000 in May.

Those are impressive figures if they prove true. After all, Palm shipped just 351,000 phones in the entire quarter prior to the Pre’s debut. If Palm ships one million Pres to Sprint (S) in the device’s first full quarter of production, as Snyder believes, that will be an achievement indeed.

As I’ve said before, turnaround story of the year.