Antennagate Cost Apple 20 Percent of iPhone 4 Sales

Ed Sutherland ()

Antennagate Cost Apple 20 Percent of iPhone 4 Sales

All the fuss over this summer’s “antennagate” surrounding the iPhone 4 release cost Apple 20 percent of sales, according to a survey released Wednesday. However, possibly more worrisome for the Cupertino, Calif. company is three times as many people complained of the lack of a Verizon iPhone than of signal trouble.

“The antenna issue is removing upside potential for iPhone units, but Verizon is actually the most significant factor limiting demand,” writes Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

Nearly 70 percent of people in the survey taken in August in downtown Minneapolis said they were aware of the antenna complaints involving the iPhone 4. A fifth of those persons – or 20 percent – were so concerned about the problems, they did not buy the new handset, according to the analyst.

According to Munster, the 20 percent translates into 880,000 lost iPhone 4 sales. Apple sells 40 percent of its handsets domestically, the analyst says. Munster expects Apple to sell 11 million iPhones in the September quarter, 4.4 million domestically.

A rumor surfaced recently from Mexico claiming Apple would release an updated iPhone 4 by the end of October, timed with the expiration of the handset maker’s free bumper offer initiated to calm concerns over reported antenna glitches.

In response to a question asking what issues affected their decision whether or not to purchase the iPhone 4, 80 percent said carrier or cost were the deciding factors.

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Those concerns could melt away if a series of rumors prove to be true. Wired editor Chris Anderson earlier this week told his Twitter audience that T-Mobile USA would get the iPhone by the end of this year, citing a manager at the carrier. A previous report had suggested Verizon would begin selling the iPhone in January.

[Fortune]

10 comments »

About the author

Ed Sutherland

Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.

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  • http://www.clickonbeauty.com Kamal

    As long as Appl is 3 weeks behind in shipments, it doesn’t matter. If they moved to Verizion – TMobile and Sprint, they couldn’t handle the orders. They really didn’t loose 880,000 potential orders, that keep then from going to 4 weeks of back orders in stead 3.

    Plus, they can’t even MAKE the white iPhone because they don’t have enough parts, time, or labor to make them. Apple needs to make a major investment in their OWN factories for better control here in the US

  • Joseph

    Apple’s production delays are hurt sales, and are still hurting sales, more than the antennae hype. For every consumer that goes into a shop to get an iPhone and is willing to wait 3 weeks, there are 2 others that aren’t willing to wait, particularly when they encounter sales staff eager to get an immediate sale and push android and other models that make higher margins for the store.

  • kc

    Lol! Are you kidding me. You take a sample questionnaire survey from downtown Minneapolis and somehow you’ve concluded that Apple lost approximately 20 percent sales on iPhone 4 potential purchases. The assumption serving as the foundation of this article is absolutely laughable.

  • Scott

    This is a ridiculous analysis. During the antennagate brouhaha, Apple sold every – single – iPhone 4 they could ship. With lines and waiting lists across the country.
    Now getting their SCM in order, that does seem to be a challenge. The truth is they could have sold 20% or more additional phones if they could have shipped them, even with the media-manufactured antennagate. There you go, write an article about supplygate.

  • charli

    100 people on one street corner is NOT a sound sample.

    Cult of Mac should be embarrassed to have such an article on the site.

  • adam thompson

    Dumbest headline in the history of business reporting. Here is why:

    What we know:

    There is a 3 week lag time between order date and shipping date on apple.com for the iPhone 4.

    Stores get shipments nearly daily at this point and sell out almost every day within 2-3 hours of shipment delivery.

    Now, hypothetically:

    Let’s say there is demand at any given time for 1M phones (again, just hypothetical). Now, let’s assume that demand is reduced by 20% as the headline here suggests. This would yield demand for 800K units. Now, let’s assume Apple can only make 600K units at any given time. Logically, apple would sell 600K units in this scenario. A 20% reduction in demand would have ZERO impact on sales. And that is precisely what we are seeing so far with the iPhone 4. How do I know this? Because of the points in the “what we know” section above as well as the fact that iPhone 4 still isn’t available globally. If there were excess supply due to reduced demand below current production levels additional countries would be flooded with excess phones. This is not happening. Sales were NOT impacted at all by antennagate, at least not y

  • Poppa

    so what if they lost 20% of iphone4 sales, Apple is still top banana of the smart phones..

  • SolarSaves

    This isn’t news, it is reporting on a very flawed survey. A sample of 258 people in one city is not big enough to draw any conclusions. It is an advertisement for Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

    You should place a disclaimer about how this survey is not able to predict anything about the iPhone 4 market and that you are just regurgitating information found elsewhere, without really analyzing the content for accuracy.

    Go back to your Statistics and Probability 101 class and you will realize that this “survey” can’t even predict what those 258 people will actually do. Trying to extrapolate this survey out to 880,000 lost sales is totally absurd. The Coefficient of Determination (goodness of fit) for this sample must be close to zero. You cannot base the actions of dozens of millions of people on such a small sample in a single city.

  • Dr. Evil

    WTF???

    I couldn’t get an iPhone 4 for an entire month and when I did it was pure luck that I got to the store just after they received their daily shipment. Exactly where were the phones fir these list sale going come from?

  • RyanTV

    I’m calling total bullshit on these numbers.