Apple says reported Android sales spurt is untrue
Recently, research group NPD issued a report saying that Android phones (in their several incarnations) passed the iPhone in U.S. sales last quarter. Apple, in a rare move, says those figures are wrong.
A number of people looked askance at the recent smartphone sales numbers as estimated by NPD in a report saying that more Android phones sold in the first quarter than iPhones. On Monday, Apple officially joined the group that feels that those sales numbers are incorrect. A spokesperson for Apple said, “This is a very limited report on 150,000 U.S. consumers responding to an online survey and does not account for the more than 85 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide. We had a record quarter with iPhone sales growing by 131 percent and with our new iPhone OS 4.0 software coming this summer, we see no signs of the competition catching up any time soon.”
Apple is generally unlikely to respond to reports like this one, so they must really feel that there is a problem with the NPD numbers. According to a Reuters report, Apple is very sure that there are no signs that the competition is gaining on them in the smartphone market. The NPD report said that Android sales accounted for 28 percent of the smartphone marketplace in the first quarter of 2010, while iPhone handset sales accounted for just 21 percent. Apple has sold 51 million iPhones since it introduced the product in 2007 and it seems unlikely that Android phones are selling at that level though, of course, anything is possible.
This is going to be a difficult story to unravel. None of the involved manufacturers report their detailed sale figures until they absolutely have to. Worse, there are a number of companies building Android smartphones and they do not all report at the same time on exactly the same periods. It may be quite some time until it is known who is actually selling what, by which time it may no longer be the case, anyway. In an arena as fluid as smartphones, the only sales that really mean anything are those of today.
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