How Many Apple Watches Were Sold Last Quarter?
On Tuesday, Apple delivered its quarter results for September but still refused to state exactly how many units of the Apple Watch had been sold. Instead the figures for the Apple Watch were lumped in with items like the iPod, the Apple TV and Beats headphones in a category called “Other Products.”
In a conference with analysts, Tim Cook stated that Apple would not be releasing the exact figures for the smartwatch for “competitive reasons.” While claiming that sales of the Apple Watch were ahead of the company’s expectations, Cook gave the excuse that “We are in the very early innings of this promising new part of our business.”
This is obviously frustrating for the Wall Street analysts that are left to make their own estimates for how many units of the Apple Watch have actually moved. While not all analysts agreed on how many of the wearable devices were sold by Apple in fiscal Q4, the consensus is 3.48 million units. The estimate for the June quarter, the first that the Apple Watch was available, is 2.5 million.
Predictions for the December quarter, which includes the first holiday shopping season for the Apple Watch, are all over the board ranging from a low of 3.09 million to a high of 15 million units. The average estimate is 6.57 million, which would give Apple a very, very merry Christmas.
One analyst compiled his own figures and is willing to say how many units of the Apple Watch he believes were sold in Q4. Neil Mawston of Strategy Analytics estimated that smartwatch shipments worldwide totaled 6.1 million units with Apple accounting for 4.5 million of them. That gives Apple 74% of the global market with Samsung placing a distant second with a share of 10%.
The remaining two months of 2015 will determine whether Apple can hold onto that share in the face of growing competition from newer smartwatches.
