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One of the more interesting numbers reported by Tim Cook during the last earnings conference call was the total payment to developers during the fourth quarter. This is the first time that Apple reported a quarterly payout to developers.

The figure was $700 million and it was mentioned in reference to the total payments to date of $4 billion. The $700 million is interesting at least because it gives an idea of what Apple obtained in total sales of Apps. As it retains 30% and pays 70% to developers then it follows that it retained $300 million and the total “gross” sales was $1 billion in Q4.[1]

The $700 million is interesting for another reason. The $1 billion in gross income can be tested against another set of data. As the countdown has already started, sometime in February Apple will report 25 billion total apps downloaded. The last such milestone was October 4th when it reported 18 billion downloads. Assuming that they will cross 25 billion by February 25th, then we can obtain an estimate for the download rate per day: about 48.6 million apps/day.

That is a figure we can plot historically:

In yesterday’s talk Tim Cook described the opportunity he felt Apple faced. To readers of this blog this opportunity has been regularly illustrated, at least on a quarterly basis.  Here is the iPhone opportunity relative to other platforms:

In absolute units by vendor, separated by smart and non-smart phones, the data looks like this:

Q: 37 million units of iPhones shipped. When do we run into the Law of Large Numbers? What are the growth opportunities coming up?

A: 37 million is a big number. It was a decent quarter. It was 37 million — more than we’d ever done before. We were pretty happy with that, but let me give you the way I look at the numbers. As I see it, that 37 million for last quarter represented 24% of the smartphone market. There’s 3 out of 4 people buying something else. 9 out of 10 phone buyers are buying something else.

Handset market is projected to go from 1.5 to 2 billion units. Take it in the context of these numbers, the truth is that this is a jaw-dropping industry with enormous opportunity. Up against those numbers, the numbers don’t seem so large anymore. What seems so large to me is the opportunity.

What we’re focusing on is the same thing we’ve always focused on. Making the world’s best products.

We think if we stay laser-focused on that, and continue to develop the ecosystem around the iPhone, that we have a pretty good opportunity to take advantage of this enormous market.

Q: The biggest opportunity is the emerging markets. Large portion of that is the prepaid market. Apple has done very well but the wholesale iPhone price point is nowhere near what we would expect in the prepaid market. How do you make it more affordable to those markets?

A: