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back to article Apple's iPhone 6 first-day sales are MEANINGLESS, mutters analyst

Record iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus sales trumpeted by Apple reveal very little about demand, says an analyst, this is because of the limited supplies of the mobes provided to stores in the initial few days. That's the conclusion of Barclay's Ben Reitzes, who said that while "response to the launch has been stronger than …

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  1. Joerg

    A Samsung or Google paid analyst, uh?

    Really.. competitors are so desperate. Android manufacturers don't disclose actual numbers, the number of real customers that bought their products but just give the press the numbers of units sold to distributors,shops... not the sold ones, which are always a lot lower than the true actual numbers of Apple.

    This analyst is so silly... what is he going to tell then at the end of this first quarter of sales? That if the iPhone6 number of units sold is going to be "just" 60million it would be a big failure? Or that if it's "just" 70 to 80million that wouldn't be enough and that it would still be a failure and next quarter the numbers would drop? Or that the new iPhones would be too expensive to manufacture and so Apple would need 120-150million units sold per quarter to break even ?

    Please... these analysts paid by competitors are really so pathetic.

    11 24 Reply
    1. Ted Treen
      Reply Icon
      Facepalm

      Re: A Samsung or Google paid analyst, uh?

      "...Barclay's analyst Ben Reitzes, who said that while "response to the launch has been stronger than expected", the figures themselves should be ignored..."

      Looking at the track records of a) analysts as a breed, and b) Barclays as a bank, better advice might be that Reitzes' utterances should be ignored.

      10 0 Reply
    2. SuccessCase
      Reply Icon

      Re: A Samsung or Google paid analyst, uh?

      @Joerg.

      Actually, I think the analyst agrees with you. You need to first run the standard The Register reframing process backwards, on the assumption (always correct) that they have looked to misrepresent the truth and place Apple in the most negative light possible. Then you will see the analyst is actually saying something very simple. The figures are meaningless because they cannot measure demand as compared with last year. There are two reasons for this. Supplies have been extremely constrained (if Last year I had 50 people who wanted to buy pears from me and 45 pears, then, from the sales figures alone, it will look like my pears were more popular then than this year when I have 100 people wanting to buy pears but only 25 pears to sell). And secondly the Chinese govt is playing silly buggers and has held up the launch in China. Ostensibly this is because they have questions that need answers before they will grant an import license. But in actuality it is because there is to their political/economic advantage to be a bit protectionist and keep a competitor foreign owned business out if only for a limited time period.

      So given these two factors, launch weekend figures are going to be lower than they would otherwise have been and the figures won't provide a guide as to the popularity of the phone. However having said that, I still expect they will be higher than last year by quite a long way.

      5 3 Reply
      1. Tom 35
        Reply Icon

        Re: A Samsung or Google paid analyst, uh?

        The other problem is last year was only an "S" half step model upgrade, not a full digit upgrade.

        1 0 Reply
      2. Dan 55 Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: A Samsung or Google paid analyst, uh?

        I think I prefer El Reg's take on Apple instead of reviews like this.

        3 3 Reply
        1. Lionel Baden
          Reply Icon
          Pint

          Re: A Samsung or Google paid analyst, uh?

          @dann 55

          OMG so much denial right there worth reading down to the last paragraph.

          That had me snirking in the office so many times :D

          great link good read

          2 0 Reply
      3. Kristian Walsh Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: A Samsung or Google paid analyst, uh?

        Oh for goodness sake...

        Nobody's insulting your favourite product maker. The analyst is making a fairly mundane point: queues and first-weekend sales are not a good indicator of how well a product will sell over its lifetime. First weekend sales represent pent-up demand and an often constrained supply, but what is really important to a company's fortunes is the longer-term demand.

        Apple has a significant chunk of customers who need to have the thing on Day 1. This creates a large pent-up demand and those impressive opening weekends. Once this cohort is satisfied, what's left is the regular consumer, the one who doesn't care so much, the one who wanted "a good phone", the one who's prepared to wait and see what else is around before changing their iPhone 4 or 4S - the one who is representative of most of Apple's customers.

        If you invest in Apple's shares, it is the behaviour of these customers that matters to your stock values, not the hardcore brand followers.

        13 3 Reply
        1. Tom 13
          Reply Icon

          @ Kristian Walsh

          Meh, yes and no.

          Apple, despite its large market share in cell phones is a niche manufacturer. For most of the time Jobs ran the company its profits depended on keeping supply limited to drive up prices, which yielded decent profits. When your average market share is in the 3-5% range, never exceeding 12% you NEED that margin to continue to exist. What has made Apple so successful this last decade is that one of their niche products went mainstream AND they managed to maintain their niche pricing. I've been told and believe that Jobs manipulated the supply of iPhones so that the top of the line models were always just a little hard to get. By this logic, one of the mistakes with the S was that it took the opposite approach to the market. So there is some sense in which this market doesn't depend on Joe Average as a customer. Joe Average is going to be an Android or other phone. Will Apple take money from Joe Average? Sure, but they don't depend on him. They may even throw him a bone by reducing pricing their old hardware while keeping niche pricing on the new "hard to get" models.

          0 0 Reply
    3. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A Samsung or Google paid analyst, uh?

      It is still quite a few sales is it not? Hard to ignore.

      3 1 Reply
    4. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      FAIL

      Re: A Samsung or Google paid analyst, uh?

      I don't hold much store by analysts either. They're looking in the wrong place for a start: orders at Apple's suppliers (easier to identify now the product is out) would be a better place. But as a supplier itself Samsung probably already knows.

      No, analysts and consultants are usually paid to put spin on company's own plans.

      0 0 Reply
  2. ecofeco Silver badge
    Coat

    Meaningless?

    Well, they certainly mean nothing to me.

    *snerk*

    2 0 Reply
  3. Alan Denman

    A load of bo**ocks !

    Weekend sales include 3rd party shop stock !

    Apart from 'direct from Apple'', Apple sales are not to the public so best ignored.

    1 6 Reply
  4. nanchatte

    I think y/y line growth is an even more pointless metric than sales...

    ... and I'm not even paid to come up with this.

    Why? Because everyone in the line is buying as many as they are allowed and punting them off to ebay.

    And as the method becomes more "guaranteed to make a fiver, mate" y/y, it just gets more popular... y/y.

    It is merely a measure of the desperation to make a quick buck of the first few hundred in the line.

    http://www.cultofmac.com/296853/iphone-6-lines-dominated-resellers/

    And there I was thinking it was all hipsters, your typical "creative types" and "organic-only" baristas.

    ---

    Here in Japan, I nipped to the local Yodobashi in Akihabara on Friday morning. There were about 100 people in the queue. Nearly all Japanese, mostly females. I spoke to a few while we were waiting and they all said they just wanted to upgrade from 4S / 5 for themselves or their husband... I was the only one of about twenty people I talked to who actually had a 5S...

    I had a chat with the shop bloke and he said that the prodigious mountain of phones "to the right"... were prebooked and they would be picked up this evening by customers returning from work. The somewhat smaller mountain "to the left" was to be sold on the day.

    As it happened, they didn't run out of stock until Tuesday evening. Even the plus didn't run out until the tuesday morning, apparently.

    It was a very muted reaction. The staff were more excited (no doubt scripted) than the people waiting.

    3 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      In Liverpool they were still in stock until the Tuesday afternoon, for some reason they were cheaper to buy second hand from hawkers down the road from the store.

      0 0 Reply
      1. Bladeforce
        Reply Icon

        not surprising..

        That's Liverpool for you ;-)

        1 0 Reply
  5. PassiveSmoking

    "Analyst" == "I'm paid an obscene amount of money to just make shit up"

    It must be a great job. You get paid a bundle for your opinion, you don't have to provide one shred of evidence to back it up, and people treat anything you say like the Word Of God Almighty Himself.

    He's right about one thing though, sales over one day are pretty much meaningless.

    1 0 Reply
    1. Wade Burchette
      Reply Icon

      It is better than that. In addition to what you said, analysts have a poor track record. They couldn't predict 12:30 as 12 noon. I would love to have a job like that.

      0 1 Reply
  6. paulf
    Facepalm

    Clearly size matters

    FTA: "Anything above 10mm units should be considered a positive surprise"

    Are phones getting smaller again?

    6 0 Reply
    1. alwarming
      Reply Icon
      Headmaster

      Re: Clearly size matters

      > 10mm

      MBA talk... they abbreviate million to mm...which perhaps alludes to the roman M (thousand) times M.

      http://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-does-m-and-mm-stand-for

      0 0 Reply
  7. John70

    Does the sales include people reselling them iPhones on day 1 as well?

    iPhone 6 Black Market

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef_BznBwktw

    0 0 Reply
  8. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    ??

    Someone did say "Naked king"? :-D

    0 0 Reply
  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    For once an analyst is correct

    He's saying you can't read much into sales figures of products that are supply constrained, so whether the announced sales number is lower, the same, or higher than last year is irrelevant because that only tells you how many were able to be produced prior to launch.

    It tells you nothing about the actual demand, so it is really only useful for a measure of "are they having manufacturing difficulties or not?"

    0 0 Reply
    1. Tom 13
      Reply Icon

      Re: For once an analyst is correct

      Mostly correct. The supply may have been right-sized or constrained. It was not however oversupplied like the S was, which says something. Just not as much as Apple would like it to.

      0 0 Reply

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