It just doesn’t add up. During Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote, he reported that Apple shipped four million iPhones so far. But AT&T says it had only about two million iPhone customers at the end of 2007. Even taking into account the fact that Apple now has service agreements with carriers in countries other than the U.S., it appears there is a discrepancy.
InformationWeek offers information from analysts at Sanford Bernstein that attempts to explain the mismatch between Apple’s and AT&T’s numbers. The analyst firm estimated that Apple’s total iPhone shipments are actually 3.75 million, not 4 million. The firm also estimated that carriers have activated 2.35 million iPhones.
“Assuming that 20% of the unactivated phones may have been unlocked to work on other networks, that still leaves 670,000 iPhones unaccounted for,” InformationWeek noted in its report.
That means that there is a pile of not-yet-activated iPhones in the hands of carriers. The question remains: can Apple still hit its target of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008? What do you think?
On a somewhat related note, Rich Tehrani blogged yesterday that Motorola may be considering spinning off its handset business. He asked whether this is really a smart move, given how big mobility is these days. The company has operations in 44 countries/regions and describes itself as “a global communications leader” that’s all about seamless mobility, broadband embedded systems and wireless networks.
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