Analyst: Apple Maintains Just 5 Day Product Inventory

Ed Sutherland (8:55 am PDT, Mar 05 2009)

Apple maintains an average five day inventory on products, with Cupertino outdistancing its PC rivals, an analyst said Thursday.

Financial analysis firm UBS said Dell was the closest PC maker, keeping inventory in stock for just a week, according to checks during the December quarter.

While China’s Lenovo maintained a 15-day inventory average, top PC maker HP had stock sitting an average of 32 days, according to UBS. Chip-making giant Intel turned-over inventory in 89 days. The record went to D-Link with 131 days of inventory.

The speed of product turnover can indicate how well a company is able to gauge consumer demand. Too much inventory can leave firms floating in excess products, while under-estimating demand can leave a manufacturer flat-footed.

Apple’s tight inventory may have been the result of the company clearing shelves of older Mac products to make way for refreshed iMacs and Mac minis unveiled earlier this week.

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About the author

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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