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Tim Cook Does It Again With Over 10 Million iPhone 6 Sales

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Apple announced that it sold over 10 million iPhone 6 and 6 Plus models from Friday through Sunday after receiving over 4 million pre-orders in the first 24 hours. Tim Cook added in the press release that the iPhone 6 had ‘shattered all previous sell-through records by a large margin’.

This is probably a bit better than expected since there had been concern from Piper Jaffray that the iPhone 5c’s channel fill would not be duplicated and from Bernstein that long lead-times and not having China would negatively affect sales the first weekend.

The shares are up about $0.80 or 0.8% to $101.75 in the pre-market and just under its all-time high of $103.74. To get a feeling for how the shares compare to various financial metrics from two years ago when they hit their previous all-time high check out this post I wrote.

Supply is Tim Cook’s Power Alley

Starting with the iPhone 4 which sold over 1.7 million on its first weekend compared to over 1 million for the 3GS Apple went on to sell over 4 million iPhone 4Ss in October 2011, over 5 million iPhone 5s in September 2012 and over 9 million iPhone 5cs and 5ss in September 2013.

Source: MacStories

In reality there is so much demand that Apple should have been able to sell almost all the iPhone 6’s that were in its and partners stores and Cook said in the press release that Apple could have sold many more. Lead-times for the iPhone 6 on Apple’s US website are 7-10 business days and for the 6 Plus they are showing 3-4 weeks.

10 million could be the upper end of what the company will ever report for first weekend iPhone sales since I doubt there will be a launch of new iPhones with features that are catching up to such pent up demand (meaning Apple has lagged having large screen smartphones by a couple of years). Also at some point there is a limit to how many iPhones the company can have its suppliers manufacture prior to its launch.

Apple is selling many more iPhone 6’s than 6 Plus’

This is probably due to supply constraints vs. customer demand as the 6 Plus’ lead-times are running two to three times longer than the 6’s. While it swings during the day from Fiksu’s chart the iPhone 6 is 5 to 6 times more than the Plus as a percent of all iPhones in use. As the 6 Plus’ lead-times drop these two lines will converge and it will be interesting to see if the 6 remains more popular than the 6 Plus.

Source: Fiksu

Chitika is also tracking the uptake of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus vs. the iPhone 5 in North America. It has a similar relationship between the 6 and 6 Plus but has lower usage rates vs. the 5 than Fiksu shows. Since the two firms measure different geographies and have different install bases of iPhones it isn’t too surprising to see different results. It therefore helps to not go overboard when looking at one firm’s numbers to calculate potential sales.