The US temporarily regains relevance for Apple’s iPhone

Feb 8, ’12 8:08 PM

Sprint reported its first iPhone quarter sales at 1.8 million. You may recall my analysis of Sprint’s “gamble” where I estimated that Sprint will easily sell the 31 million iPhone which they committed to buy from Apple. I had estimated that they could sell an average of 7 million units a year but perhaps conservatively they could ramp at 4, 6, 9 and 12 over the four year period rumored to be in the contract.

Given the pent-up demand I also estimated that the first quarter could reach 2 million units. They managed 1.8 and that’s a solid start. Overall the US carriers activated 13.7 million iPhones. Here are the iPhone activations by US Operator:

That’s 37% of the total market in Q4, shown in area and bar charts below:

Note that the percent of total activations outside the US has dropped but that is due to the limited distribution of the iPhone 4S outside the US in the launch quarter. The long-term trend is for the US to decrease as a percent of total iPhones even with the additional US distribution.

By comparing the net adds to US install base from comScore survey data, we can estimate that about 63% of US purchases of iPhones were replacements and that 8.7 million iPhones were put out of use in the US last quarter.

Anonymous

Did Sprint report the number of Android phones sold during the same period? We know that the iPhone outsold all Android phones combined on AT&T & Verizon, the question is whether it did so on Sprint as well.
- http://twitter.com/studuncan Stu Duncan
  
  No. Android is only mentioned once in their earnings report. In a list of other phones sold.
  
  S Report: http://newsroom.sprint.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=2179
- Anonymous
  
  It was probably the same. The giant LTE Android handsets are not selling well anywhere.
- Anonymous
  
  I am very curious about this information as well. Given that we have some NPD data suggesting that the iPhone was about 43% marketshare of smartphones in the quarter and outsold Android phones by a wide margin on both AT&T and Verizon, Sprint has to have made up some of that in Android’s favor. There’s also T-Mo, smaller regional carriers and other platforms to consider but that’s a fairly big deficit to make up.
  
  IOW, it seems as though Android outsold iPhone by a wide margin on those carriers. This is all just speculation but I can’t think of another way the numbers would work out as they have.
sebi

“[...] and that 8.7 million iPhones were put out of use in the US last quarter.” I guess, most of the replaced iPhones will be given to family members or sold to other people.
- Anonymous
  
  I think “out of use” means literally out of use. As in no longer being used. So selling an iphone or giving it to a friend/family member would not be a part of the estimated 8.7 million ‘out of use’ iphones.
Anonymous

I think you might be comparing activations to sales as if they are the same. Verizon listed their sales. Apple lists sales. AT&T listed activations which include old iPhones that were activated on their network last quarter. For example, I purchased a 4S when it was released (previous quarter). I then activated my 4 for my mother in the quarter that just ended. So this would count as one of AT&Ts activations but it can not be subtracted from Apple’s total sales to help you arrive at the non-US number that you did. You need to know how many iPhones were activated on the AT&T network that were not purchased last quarter.
Cherog

Horace
I like the way how you do look at the figuers and also especially how you are visualizing your conclusions. Do you show that non-US iPhone activation is more than the US one. Do you know how it’s split between Europe and Asia?
Thanks
- http://www.asymco.com Horace Dediu
  
  I don’t know the split in Asia or Europe. That information is not public.
Kari Valkama

I would like to know also, like Ted_T, what percentage of Sprint’s sales were iPhones, as opposed to Android phones. As we know, both AT&T and Verizon sell more iPhones than Android phones. It will be interesting to see, when and if that happens with Sprint also.
Guest

Any idea what the total number of active U.S. iPhones is? comScore data has around 27MM. Seems very low to me.

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/12/comScore_Reports_November_2011_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share
- http://www.asymco.com Horace Dediu
  
  comScore does not measure three key user bases (1) users under the age of 13 (2) business owned phones used by employees (3) secondary phones.
  - Askbal
    
    Does that affect your estimate of new v/s replacement iPhones?
  - http://www.asymco.com Horace Dediu
    
    It should but there is no reliable data to estimate these quantities.
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Paul

Would the data (figures) represented on chart 4 available in a excel sheet?
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http://twitter.com/MagnetApparel Magnet

Excellent job on this post Horace. I appreciate you putting this out.

asymco

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