Can Apple Sell 100 Million iPhones?

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 11, 6:46AM EDT

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Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) success this quarter will turn much more on iPhone sales than on the launch of the Apple Watch or early demand for it. Sales of the smartphone remain such a large portion of Apple’s revenue that even a wild success of other products will not do much to impress investors. iPhone sales will need to be extraordinary to prove Apple’s momentum has not diminished. That means it will need to sell close to 100 million iPhone models in the current quarter.

The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus were launched on September 6, so sales did not contribute to all the days of the most recent quarter. Granted, early demand was so tremendous that it made up for the date issue. In the past quarter, Apple sold 74.5 million iPhones, which drove $51.1 billion in revenue against a quarterly total of $74.6 billion.

The theories that Apple cannot sell 100 million iPhones this quarter fall into two schools. The first is that demand has been so great since the smartphone was launched that everyone who wants one has one. The other is that a growing number of people prefer Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Android operating system, which is at the heart of Samsung phones, over Apple’s iOS.

However, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus sales may continue to be lifted due to China. Because of the size of the nation’s wireless market, Apple could ride that to much of the 100 million iPhone sales this quarter. China’s population owns more than 1.2 billion wireless devices. Apple is a partner with several of the largest carriers there, led by China Mobile Ltd. (NYSE: CHL), which according to Forbes has 50 million 4G subscribers.

The Apple Watch may be the flag bearer of the company’s ongoing innovation, but iPhone sales are the only yardstick for its success. Apple’s extraordinary $725 billion market cap and all-time high stock price do not rely on a watch.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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