A quality infographic is worth a thousand words; by that logic, since GigaOm’s latest infographic breaking down exactly who is getting rich off the iPhone (and by how much) contains roughly exactly that amount of words, it’s actually worth about a million.
Although there’s a lot of fantastic data in the GigaOm infographic, the thing that it makes most explicit is exactly how much money AT&T is making off the iPhone… and exactly how much it has to lose if their exclusivity deal lapses in 2010. According to GigaOm, AT&T actually makes $369 dollars off of the sale of every iPhone. That might not seem like a lot, but it will earn AT&T almost $2 billion dollars over the next two years in monthly data charges on the iPhones sold in the third quarter of 2009 alone.
That’s food for thought. AT&T hasn’t exactly been acting lately like a company about to lose the vaster part of its ill-begotten lucre over the next few years, which is exactly what will happen if its iPhone exclusivity lapses. With the iPhone worth, let’s say, $4 billion a year to AT&T, one wonders exactly how much they’d be willing to pay Apple just to keep control of their bread winner.
Check out out the full infographic at the link below. A lot of sites are just snapping up the entire image and regurgitating it back up locally; that’s not quite fair to the GigaOm guys, so we’re just including a snip of it: you should definitely click through to see the entire thing.
Who Is Getting Rich Off The iPhone [GigaOm]
