Is Legal Due Diligence Exposing Scary Low Apple Sales?
By Business Insider
April 19 2011
wallstcheatsheet.com
Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) new lawsuit against Samsung includes some interesting and potentially disappointing sales stats for some of Apple’s portable gadgets.
In particular, it looks like Apple’s iPad shipments for the March quarter could be materially weaker than expected.
Via Asymco’s Horace Dediu, in Apple’s suit against Samsung, it says…
“As of March 2011, more than 108 million iPhones had been sold worldwide”
“By March 2011, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) sold over 19 million iPads”
Dediu did the math, subtracting prior sales, and figured out that implies a minimum 18.1 million iPhones shipped during the quarter and a minimum 4.2 million iPads.
The iPhone number is roughly in line with estimates (Dediu was expecting 18.4 million), but the iPad number is well below the 6-7-8 million iPads that many analysts expect Apple to report tomorrow afternoon for the March quarter.
We know that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) had a very hard time meeting iPad 2 demand during the quarter, that many consumers knew the iPad 2 was coming and may not have purchased an original iPad during the lead-up, and that the December quarter was huge for iPad shipments.
So it’s not unfathomable that iPad shipments would be this weak for the March quarter. (And there still seems to be significant, unmet demand for the iPad 2, which Apple can’t manufacture fast enough.)
It’s also possible Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is lowballing the estimates, or that there’s a technical difference here between “sales” and “shipments.”
Or that “by March 2011,” Apple means “by the beginning of March,” and not “by the end of March.”
But any March quarter iPad shipments stat below 5 or 6 million would be much lower than anticipated. |
