sales - page 6

While Apple saw strong sales for all its iOS devices during its post-holiday quarter, Android tablet sales slumped, giving up any gains that Android had seen as a tablet platform during the holiday shopping season.

According to IDC, overall tablet shipments were down more than the analyst firm had expected. The decline to 17.4 million units represented a 38.4% drop off from the holiday quarter shipments of 28.2 million units – a notably steeper decline than IDC’s predicted 34% decline.

While overall tablet shipments were down, Android tablets slumped significantly more than Apple’s iPad, which gained an additional 13.3% of the tablet market.

When analysts and companies compare mobile devices, the big number everyone focuses on is how much market share each platform or product has in relation to its competitors. While this makes for a good overall view of the playing field, it doesn’t always give a clear or accurate picture of which companies are doing well on a single metric as a model for success and ignores others, like whether a platform or manufacturer managed to turn a significant profit.

This is, of course, a very big point when discussing Apple’s iOS succes compared to Android as a whole or to individual manufacturers – and something that Asymco’s latest review of the mobile phone market in which Apple accounts for a small 8.8% of handsets but reaps a whopping 73% of the industry’s profits.

It’s no secret that the iPad is Apple’s fastest selling product ever. That fact was made clear during the company’s recent financial call when Tim Cook compared how long it took for other Apple products to reach current iPad sales figures. What hasn’t been as clear is just how much the iPad is expanding Apple’s overall customer base.

A new NPD study, however, shows that the iPad is playing a significant role in helping Apple attract new customers. It turns out that one out of every four iPad buyers have never owned an Apple product before.

There are a number of fields and professions in which mobile professionals share a pool of mobile devices. For companies with field agents, sales people, and marketing professionals, the need for each user to have a dedicated device may not be the most economical option and a better approach can be to simply configure a number of iPads with similar specs that users or teams can check out when they go on the road.

This shared iPad model can be  a way to implement the iPad while reducing overall expense. One challenge, however, is that a business typically needs to provide mobile Internet access for individuals or small teams – something that can be a pricey proposition.

Apple has always been considered the underdog of the PC industry, although Mac sales have been on an upwards trend for the last few years while the rest of the industry continues to take a nosedive. The iPad is cannibalizing PC sales, and PC manufacturers are starting to concentrate on the smartphone and tablet space. The “PC” sales numbers are still not quite matching up with reality: the iPad is a personal computer, and Apple is crushing the competition.

With that in mind, research firm Gartner has released its PC shipments report for the first quarter of 2012. According to the report, Apple sits as the third largest PC maker in the U.S.. And the iPad? Well, no one can touch the iPad.

Smartphones are close to becoming the primary type of mobile phones sold in the U.S. for the first time. Market research giant Neilsen’s latest analysis of the mobile industry shows that about half of all mobile phone owners in the country now own a smartphone – up significantly from this time last year.

In addition to smartphones gaining major traction, the company also released its data on the makeup of the U.S. smartphone market that shows gains by Apple’s iPhone and significant losses for RIM’s BlackBerry. Android, however, still manages to hold the biggest share of the market overall.

One of the immediate associations that most people have when they think about the iPad in business is the iPad as a sales tool. Not surprising given its form factor and the ease with which it can display presentations, offer up a portfolio, and generate quotes on the fly.

Do those abilities really add up to increased sales over binders of information, colorful brochures, and canned presentations on DVD? For home security giant ADT, the answer is an emphatic yes.

Earlier today, Tim Cook played coy with how many new iPads they had sold opening weekend, but a mere eight hours later, the numbers are in, and it’s a record setting weekend indeed: Apple sold 3 million iPads in the first weekend of sales alone. That’s three times as many as last year… and with plenty to go around for everyone. Press release after the jump.

Apple announced over the weekend that it had completely sold out of its pre-order stock for the new iPad, stating that demand for the new tablet is “off the charts.” Now analyst Gene Munster is predicting that Apple will sell over 1 million units during the new iPad launch this Friday, March 16th.

Dell attempted today to rebrand itself as an end-to-end enterprise IT vendor amid slowing consumer PC sales. The company appears to be following in the footsteps of IBM, which sold its PC business to Lenovo, and HP, which came close to selling off its personal systems division last summer.

Dell won’t be getting out of the PC business completely, at least not yet. The company will continue to produce its XPS line of computers, which it cites as a success. It will, however, move away from less profitable markets including PC peripherals.

If you’ve read the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, you may remember that Apple’s board was initially very hesitant to give Jobs a green light about creating Apple’s retail stores. A decade later, the stores have been an amazing success with hundreds of outlets around the world. They have also become the most profitable retail outlets in America.

Research company RetailSails ranked the country’s top retailers using the common retail metric of annual sales per square foot. Apple nabbed the top spot with sales averaging $5,647 per foot – nearly double high-end jeweler Tiffany and Co., which came in a distant second.

It’s amazing what you see when you look closely at numbers, and super-analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco looks closer than most. Parsing some of Tim Cook’s keynote speech at Goldman Sachs earlier this week, he did some digging came up with the incredible graph you see above.

What sort of numbers should Apple report later today for the first quarter of 2012? The third quarter surprised all analysts as Apple announced a rare under-performing quarter due to the late introduction of the iPhone 4S. Stung by that rebuke, professional analysts are offering conservative projections for the first quarter of 2012. This sets up a classic pros versus independents cliffhanger.

If you’re reading us from Asia, great news: the Asian continent’s own answer to Black Friday starts tomorrow, January 6th, and as rumored. Apple’s now having a Lunar New Year Sale to celebrate, offering discounts on most of their popular products in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.

The discounts are basically similar to those U.S. Apple Store customers saw in November, with discounts of between 6-8% on iPads, 10% discounts on iPods, and between 5-10% off all MacBooks.

If you’re in one of the aforementioned countries and want to start the New Year right, get hopping: this sale will only continue for 24 hours.

US carriers can’t sell the iPhone 4S fast enough, according to a new report by The Wall Street Journal. Potential iPhone customers are still unable to get their eager hands on Apple’s coveted smartphone, with many carriers estimating shipping dates of 1-3 weeks.

Initial iPhone 4S sales have made the device Apple’s fastest-selling product of all time, and demand continues to outpace supply.

The iPhone 4S continues to break sales records left and right. Pre-orders for the iPhone 4S started in Hong Kong last Friday, and it’s been reported that pre-orders sold out after the first 10 minutes of availability.

Apple will launch the 4S in 14 more countries this Friday, and the smartphone is expected to reach mainland China by December.

Apple has been on quite the winning streak lately. With the next iPhone announcement on the horizon, things are only looking up for the folks in Cupertino.

With Apple set to reveal its last quarter financial results on October 18th, predictions are that the company will see growth in Mac and iPad sales, with a slight decline in iPhone sales.

Apple has announced the date for its Q4 2011 earnings call to investors. The Cupertino company will hold its financial conference call on October 18th for the fourth fiscal quarter.

Q4 of 2011 ended on Saturday, September 24th. After stellar results in Q3 of 2011, Apple is expected to do just as well, if not better, in its results for the fourth quarter.

Mac sales are showing continued growth in the most recent business quarter of 2011, according to a new report from esteemed analyst Gene Munster.

As noted by market research firm NPD, Apple’s Mac sales are up 22% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2011. Strong sales are mainly attributed to the introduction of the new MacBook Air and Mac Mini models released in July.

Apple has already overtaken Nokia as the smartphone leader when it comes to the number of units manufactured, but according to a forecast from DigiTimes, the Cupertino company could also overtake the once unbeatable Finnish phone vendor in shipments by the end of this year.

Mac sales continue on a steep upward trend, with Needham analyst Charlie Wolf weighing in on Apple’s Mac sales for June of 2011. As Wolf notes, the Mac saw its 21st consecutive quarter in which shipment growth for the Mac surpassed that of the entire PC market.

Overall, the Mac saw an astounding 14.6% growth in worldwide shipments, while the PC market saw a minimal growth rate of 2.7%. The reason for the Mac’s continued spike in growth? Asia.

Remember Panasonic’s 3DO game system back in the mid ’90s? Not surprised if you don’t; it failed miserably and was discontinued after three years, despite being packed with promise and cutting-edge technology. But the three-year sales record of this flop have thus far still managed to handily beat that of Android tablets — all of them. Combined.

Apple sold 9.2 million iPads in the last business quarter of 2011, and the company’s CFO even went on record to say that Apple is selling “every iPad we can make.” This has been evidenced by the delayed shipping times for the iPad 2 since its release, with the tablet finally receiving a normal online shipping estimation only a couple weeks ago.

To contrast the iPad’s unprecedented success in the consumer tablet market, the Motorola Xoom shipped 440,000 units last quater. And, no, “ship” does not mean “sold.”

Apple has held its earnings call for the third business quarter, and there’s plenty of new information and speculation to glean from what was said. The rumor mills are always churning, but rarely does the industry get as much actual hard data from Apple as it does during one of these earnings calls.

Apple’s success up to this point is phenomenal, but what’s even more interesting is the future of Apple’s business. We’ve gathered the main highlights from this last earnings call to give you a good idea of where Apple is headed in the coming months.

It’s no secret that Apple retail stores have been a phenomenal success. In terms of sales growth, Apple is the fastest-growing retailer in the US.

Apple store sales have seen a staggering 80% increase since last year, and sales show no sign of slowing anytime soon.