FWIW, I'm expecting ~$7 per month/per phone in back-end revenue sharing.
Tim Cook all but confirmed this on the last CC. He stated that "payments from AT&T would be booked when received." With the iPhone being amortized over 24 months, any sales spiff would have been similarly amortized, but this isn't the case. Therefore, the logical conclusion is a back-end revenue share along the lines that RIMM sees. IMO, AAPL provides more value than RIMM and will likely comman more, hence the $7/mo/phone vs. RIMM's $5/mo/phone.
This is huge coup for AAPL as it provides recurring revenue that drops straight to the bottom line and only grows bigger with the more iPhones sold. If they can sell 8M phones in CY 2008, that's an additional $168M per year in profit coming in, 8M more in 2009 becomes $336M, etc. The question you have to ask is how much more than 8M will they sell by EOY 2008?
If that weren't enough, look at what aTV could do with video rentals - another huge revenue/cash stream. I've been calling for this since January when aTV launched - another logical extension that only one analyst has picked up on so far - Shawn Wu. |
