Up to 1 million iPhones may be purchased through Apple gift cards, giving Cupertino a boost during an otherwise expected flat 2009, one analyst said Wednesday.
Use of Apple gift cards to purchase iPhones means many handsets won’t be activated until after Dec. 25. That delay could result in misleading December iPhone sales, Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu told investors.
“The risk here is that the customer will likely activate post-Christmas; therefore revenue and units won’t likely be recognized until the March quarter,” Wu wrote. March is viewed as usually a weak month for sales.
Wu expects Apple will report selling 6 million iPhones for the December quarter, down slightly from the 6.9 million announced in September. The analyst’s prediction agrees with a consensus of 6 million to 6.5 million iPhones shipped for this period.
On another issue, Wu maintains Apple will introduce a sub-$100 iPhone, but not before the end of the year. A flurry of rumors appeared recently that discount retail giant Walmart might sell a $99 4GB iPhone Dec. 28.
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.
