Apple may have back-to-back record sales for its iconic iPhone. The company is on track to sell 10 million handsets for the quarter ending late December, according to a Monday report. If correct, the sales would top the record 7.4 million iPhone Apple sold during the previous quarter.
Some attribute the rise to the iPhone becoming available in more countries and the handset being sold by multiple carriers.
“Sales of the Apple iPhone 3GS far exceeded expectations, and sales are expected to reach 10 million in the fourth quarter of 2009,” writes the Taiwan-based Digitimes. The comments are based on a 32 percent jump in orders for smartphone components.
Although traditionally cell phone makers increase their supply orders to meet holiday sales demands, those suppliers linked to Apple were singled-out as benefitting from the double-digit increases. Samsung, which makes the application processors, Infineon, maker of the iPhone’s baseband and radio frequency transceivers, and TriQuint, which manufactures power amplifiers were noted in the report.
While several rivals – most recently Verizon’s Droid – have attempted to wrest the iPhone’s buzz, so far “no one develops user-friendly software like Apple does,” analyst Charlie Wolf Monday told investment customers of Needham & Co. In his “Wolf Bytes” report, the analyst described the iPhone as the “gold standard” for smartphones.
[Via AppleInsider and 9to5Mac]
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.
