KGI Research’s Ming-Chi Kuo, one of the few analyst/firms with a respectable record on Apple forecasts, updated its iPhone sales expectation numbers this weekend for the holiday quarter and Q1 of 2015.
Strong iPhone shipments in 4Q14. We forecast overall iPhone shipments will surge 82% QoQ to 71.5mn units in 4Q14, given robust demand for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. The iPhone 6 Plus supply shortage implies not only robust demand, but also confirms our concerns regarding constraints within the supply chain. We believe 4Q14 iPhone shipments will be stronger if supply chain constraints are eased.
Kuo notes that the iPhone 5c and 4s which are still sold in emerging markets [like Virgin Mobile in the US?!] will be discontinued in 2015 after promotions that ironically will improve low end sales numbers in Q1 2015. Subsequently, average price per device sold will also drop significantly for Apple in Quarter 1…
The removal of the iPhone 4s and 5c will also make TouchID and features like Apple Pay ubiquitous across Apple’s phone lineup.
As for the iPhone 6/6 Plus mix, KGI expects it to settle at a 2:1 ratio favoring the iPhone 6 once supply constraints ease up. That is close to what we’ve seen from analysts and our own site.
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KGI forecasted a similar holiday spike/2015 fall for iPads last month.
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Pretty solid numbers if they pan out.
Kuo was the only person to have correctly predicted the iPhone 6s screen resolutions back in April especially the FHD for the 5.5 version. But the same cannot be said about other predictions. I don’t think there will be such a high slip up in the 1Q15 using history as a reference.
QoQ numbers are basically useless. YoY is what is meaningful. I know I can dig up the numbers for last year but seems like that is critical piece of data to gain an understanding of how fast Apple’s iPhone business is growing. If you look at the 1Q15 QoQ delta, you’d think Apple was going to go out of business, when in fact it is just the seasonality.
100% agree – QoQ is rather meaningless but alas we have the same suspects trumpet it as thought it was some sort of meaningful statistic. What I think will be interesting is seeing whether the iPhone 6 Plus eats into their iPad mini sales and whether the iPad mini still has a place now that there is a phablet on offer to consumers.
That would be 51.03M in Q1 of 14
Im very curious to see what the Mac line up will do this quarter, I thought the Q4 number was one of the better surprises in the announcement. Either way it’s going to be one hell of a quarter, quite possibly the highest quarterly profit ever posted by any company in history (I think)