Today’s story in the San Jose Mercury News:
Bad news for Apple: AT&T announces decline in iPhone sales, Apple stock slumps again
Apple (AAPL) stock fell again on Wall Street in Tuesday trading, after original iPhone carrier AT&T announced its sales of the Cupertino company’s iPhone had fallen more than 40 percent in the most recent quarter.As the mobile industry adopts new fees and other impediments to consumer upgrades to new smartphones, AT&T’s iPhone sales dropped from a record 7.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2011 to 4.3 million in the first quarter of 2012. [Mercury News]
Of course, there’s lots of money in punditry that ignores facts in favor of sensational headlines. Here’s the reality: the AT&T iPhone sales are only a drop when viewed against the last quarter. They represent a higher activation number than all the quarters before that. And:
… the continued trend toward smartphone adoption means that the iPhone is representing a growing proportion of total phone sales (smartphone and non-smartphone) at AT&T. The carrier notes that smartphones represented more than 78% of its total phone sales to postpaid customers, meaning that the iPhone accounted for roughly 60% of AT&T’s total phone sales to those customers during the quarter. [MacRumors]
Translation: AT&T sold fewer iPhones this quarter than last, because last quarter was the debut of a new phone. They still sold more iPhones than they had done in the quarters before that, and 21% of those were to new customers. iPhone now represents about 75% of AT&T’s smartphone sales, and of all phones sold by AT&T, iPhone is the single largest seller, period.
