With Tim Cook stating that Apple is “not announcing the numbers” for Apple Watch sales, it’s been left to the analysts to estimate – or perhaps, ‘take a wild guess’ would be the better description in this case. While Fortune reports the average estimate of 3.95M sales, the range is so wide as to be meaningless: from a low of 2.5M to a high of 6M.
Cook did, however, give one clue that those analysts coming in on the low side are likely to be wrong …
We shipped a lot [of Apple Watches] the first quarter, then last quarter we shipped even more. I can predict this quarter we will ship even more.”
Apple reports its fiscal Q4 (calendar Q3) earnings next week, but based on Cook’s comments to date, we’re unlikely to learn the actual numbers then. You can see the analyst estimates below – professionals in blue, amateurs in green.
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Since Apple won’t be announcing any numbers this analysis is kind of silly, no? First you have to guess what revenues were and then estimate an average selling price to get an estimate of what sales might have been. And for what? You can’t track them back to anything to know if you were close.
It may be kind of silly but it’s all they have when companies like Samsung who report announce anything. I think Tim Cook is being clever by not breaking down watch sales. It’s once less thing for the naysayers to spin. But we can infer something by the fact that Swiss watch sales are down 8.5% last quarter.
Does it matter if Samsung or anyone else wish to announce their figures? The general consensus is the Apple Watch is the best smartwatch available today – and it is. If it works for YOU then who cares how much it sells? After all sales aren’t always an indicator of how good something is.
I couldn’t do without my Apple Watch but I’m not suddenly going to get rid of it and think it’s rubbish just because Apple don’t announces sales figures for it.
Not silly. Analysis like this is for serious investors who look for trends.
I don’t care about sales figures one bit. I think it’s odd that Wall Street firms are putting out numbers when it’s quite clear Apple won’t be giving them anything. If I’m an AAPL investor what do these numbers do for me?
If I’m an Apple investor I look at the fact that he said the health aspects have a long product roadmap and see that Apple is going to change the world with biometrics in the future, and sell this, or whatever else they strap to your body with biometrics in insane numbers in the future.
If you are an AAPL investor who is just going to hold your stocks no matter what, then it doesn’t make a difference to you. If you area shorter term trader, then analyst predictions matter insofar as “expectations” largely dictate the movement of a stock post-earnings, no matter whether the earnings were stellar or not. They can be stellar and still fall short of “expectations” and then the stock goes down, an unfortunately all-too-common story when it comes to AAPL.
Apple tells us absolutely everything we need to know when it provides quarterly guidance. How Apple achieves its guidance is secondary to actually performing.
For all I care about unit sales of anything Apple manufactures, as long as Apple surpasses its revenue guidance, Apple could have done it selling paper weights.
WS NEEDS to publicly focus on the minutiae in order to prove they know of that which they speak. The trust his that very few of them have a clue as to what is going on, or what will happen in the future, hence estimates that all over the map. If they did the banking meltdown of 2008 (that caused the failure of 100 year old banks) would have never happened.
2 million tops.