Moonray,
I am still finding it difficult to figure out how well the Lumia is selling and therefore, how well the launch has gone. It seems that some of the preordered phones were available on friday, april 6, which would explain the reviews prior to the official launch(although I do have a guess more towards the end of the post). The phone definitely is not in short supply. The Nokia report is also interesting because it does not sound like margins and sales of the new phones are expected to be stellar in the coming quarter yet they are saying there is momentum building with increasing numbers of activations sequentially without really telling us how many activations there really are(again possibly being the differences between shipped or sold phones and activations). The news is definitely weighing down Nokia and MSFT in todays market(and I see AAPL has turned negative this am-possibly on the lawsuit news).
The Mossberg review to me, tells me that the Lumia may have some difficulty finding an audience unless they are price sensitive or Apple/Google haters, although the people that are writing reviews on Amazon seem to like the phone which may be more important overall in the long term, if they are real reviews and not plants. I think the data/software glitch, while probably minor and not affecting an ungodly percentage of phones, is not good news in terms of publicity in trying to advance the platform. Trying to massage the numbers, if I take the 2 million sold and say that all were activated with some sequential increases, maybe they sold 900K during the month of march, looking at 30K phones per day to make the math easy. If they can continue to sequentially increase the numbers of phones sold, then maybe by the month of june, 1.5 to 2 million phones sold per month, looking maybe for a total of 4-5 million Lumia smartphones sold during the quarter. If they were actually looking to sell that many phones during the quarter, then I would expect their margins to be somewhat better than what they are projecting, unless they are looking at a lot of phones that are not being sold that will need to be written down.
Taking a look at the Best Buy website, I don't see a single review for the new Lumia. For the Lumia 710, there are not that many reviews on the best buy site and not that many on the amazon site as well. If I had to guess based on everything I am seeing so far, throwing in the quarterly report without knowing what went on in the CC, I would guess that the first sentence of Moonrays post says it all, that sales aren't all that good at present. It will be interesting to see how things go on from here.
Anecdotally, I have seen 1 Windows phone in the wild. Easy to spot because of the tiles on the home screen. It will be interesting to see how often they show up on in the wild.
Any comments, corrections, criticisms welcome. Good luck today
Neal |
