Alan,
Thanks for the links to those press releases, but you've got an important number skewed.
12/1/99: It's 1.3 million TVs with guides, not 1 million
1/6/00: 1.5 million TVs with guides sold, the difference being .2 million sold since 12/1, not .5 million.
4/11/00: The two millionth TV with a guide sold in Q1, meaning that at least .5 million were sold that quarter,
an average monthly rate of at least 167,000 units. (The problem in this analysis is that we only know the two millionth unit was sold; it might have been the 2.25 millionth unit.)
If your contact at Thomson is right that they sold 2 million TVs with guides over an 18-month period, that means the 12/1 report of 1.3 million units was over a period of 14 months. The average monthly rate was about 93,000 units.
Let's assume 75% of them were sold in the most recent six-month segment of that 14-month period ending 12/1. That puts the average monthly rate during those six months at 163,000. (1.3 million X 75% / 6 months = 163,000)
I'm doing a lot of guessing here, but if I'm close to being right, selling 500,000 to 750,000 in Q1 is not a huge rate of growth over the previous period in which we know 200,000 were sold in December and maybe 150,000 to 175,000 were sold in the previous September, October and November.
For me, the tornado watch remains in effect. I've not seen empirical evidence of a sighting.
--Mike Buckley |
