Apple on track to sell one millionth iPhone by end of September

Come on guys. Apple dropped the price of the iPhone $200 in two months. They NEED to make their sales estimate of 1 million iPhones by end of September lest they deal with a fickle market that will decapitalize the company by selling off stock. While the phone is probably selling "well", its likely selling below projections and needs a boost.

Its not the end of the world, its business as usual.

Some of you folks have got to be kidding me. You honestly think it was all part of a grand plan for Steve Jobs to discontinue one model of the iPhone and drastically cut prices on the other model by 33% after being on the market for only sixty-nine days? That is sheer fantasy! Steve Jobs even admitted to CNBC ( http://www.cnbc.com/id/20610206 ) that people were hesitating because of price. Let's look at the numbers. Apple sold 270,000 phones over the last days of June (we have that from the previous quarter's statement). To get to one million, they only need to sell 730,000 more. They have not reached that yet. According to iSuppli, even though the iPhone was the fastest selling smartphone in all of July, Apple hasn't even sold as many phones through July as they had that June. Yes, they say they're on track for one million before the end of this month, but could they have said that before the $100 price cut?

#9...... you are correct. SJ is too savvy not to have planned this from the beginning. It's not like iPhone sales didn't match up to expectations and so they went to plan B with the ipod touch. Give me a break. This stock price decline today is just Institutions taking profits to get in at a lower price.

I think Apple is playing a strategy game with the smartphone/portable media market. I think Apple see that they must succeed with their strategy of getting as many of these out there as possible so they can grow a stick so big they can beat the content companies and phone companies all in one go. Some piece of the puzzle that only Apple knows has fallen into place and SJ feels this is the best time to lower the price to get a ground swell of adopters so he can dictate going forward both mobile content and telephony market. SJ ain't dumb and he's got a strategy all mapped out triggered by specific market events. The huge iPhone price drop means some event has triggered his internal playbook for that market.

"Meanwhile, a survey by research firm iSuppli released Tuesday suggested that iPhone sales had slowed markedly after their first days on store shelves and were not on pace to meet Apple's own forecast for current quarter sales."

http://origin.mercurynews.com/ci_6807817

I doubt Apple planned a 33% price cut before the lanuch (If they did then they really did screw us. Its been something like 70ish days since the launch. If sales are doing so well and they just wanted market share why not cut the price a more reasonable amount 15% and wait a bit longer or as some have said with a refreshed iPhone product. That way current customers don't get so pissed that they got ripped off so soon and you can still grow market share. I think this miscalculated sales and decide to cut prices.

Plus what iPhone refresh just happened? None. And as a lot of people have noted Apple normally keeps the price the same or near the same and adds features to make it more attractive. I remember that Apple wanted to show the mobile phone market that cells phones are worth something and have value thats why no subsidy. They want their products to have value over the long term. Well how do you do that if you drop your drawers so quickly?

Between solid sales and economies of scale I'm not surprised that Apple dropped the price. But so soon ?! And by so much ?! I have to say that a $200 price drop makes me more than a tiny bit upset ... even thinking I paid too much.

I'm with Zuriel. Economies of scale. I took Micro-Economics twice (wanted to better my C) and I can tell you this is very apparent if you look at the iPod over the long term. But I know what you're thinking "it's only been 2 weeks". Well, when you're such a profitable company like Apple, you're meeting you goals, the holiday season is around the corner, and you just introduced a fairly competing product in the iPod Touch, you want to give people a reason to keep buying iPhones, and to "beat" estimates (cos we all know that's always good). Then you make a price cut. I bought a 4gb back in mid July and I can tell you I don't regret a day that I spent hacking, browsing the internet and getting un-lost from downtown Phoenix :p... It has been a smooth ride... $3.50/day was worth having an iPhone.

The last thing Apple needed was a stock shortage when the iPhone launch came around, given how much hype it had. What's the best way to manage that? Raise the price.

They ended up sailing pretty close to the wind at the start, but the supply chain was working smoothly soon afterwards. Yeah, two months isn't long, but Apple isn't unknown for cutting prices when products get a refresh (in fact, it does that pretty regularly), and they've been working on the iPod Touch for a while now.

Basically, they planned this. They may not have planned the timing, but they certainly planned the strategy. All this “lower than expected iPhone sales” stuff is pretty much plucked out of thin air.

"2. iPhone sales, while doing well, aren't doing quite as well as Apple would like, and so Apple's lowering the price to meet their sales goals."

Apple lowered the price because they were not selling as well as planned. Apple never releases a product and drops the price more than 30% just two months later. That ends up just pissing off your customers and if the product is selling up to expectations then lowering the price lowers profits.

Face it they needed to drop the price to get sales numbers up.

Its a good product but the price and the limited carrier choice makes it a much harder sale than an iPod. Plus the competition is much tougher than the iPods competitors.