Just about any way you slice it, those new iPhone sales are pure gold for Apple. The Cupertino company moved 9 million iPhone 5s and 5cs over the weekend in the 11 countries around the globe where it dazzled buyers.
We thought it’d be interesting to track the number of iPhones sold compared to the ratio of countries it was available in for that first, breakout weekend.
And it turns out Apple is definitely still in the money. For example, the iPhone 3G launched in 22 countries but sold one million phones over the first three days. Its sales-to-availability ratio is about 450,000 per country, that’s about half amount compared to the new iPhone. The iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 were available in seven and nine countries, respectively, but their sales hover around the same ratio at about 550,000 per country. (Clearly, China’s inclusion for the first time in the launch helped move a few units, despite the underwhelming launch event.) Apple started releasing first-weekend sales info with the 3G model.
Compare that to another fun metric: it took 74 days to sell the first one million first-gen iPhones: appetite for new Apple products seems to only increase with time.
