Not Dead Yet: iPhone Sales Surge

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Not Dead Yet: iPhone Sales Surge

© Apple Inc.

There have been questions about whether modest iPhone sales would hurt Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction) revenue and stock value. Its market cap recently topped $3 trillion, so some questions have been put to rest. New research shows that the iPhone 15 is doing unusually well worldwide.

Research firm TrendForce released its analysis of global smartphone production for the third quarter of this year. Production is different from sales. Presumably, however, virtually all the phones that major manufacturers produce are sold quickly.

The bottom line of the TrendForce data was that “Global smartphone production in the third quarter reached approximately 308 million units, marking a 13% QoQ increase.” QoQ means quarter over the previous quarter. The firm also noted that holiday sales would likely hold the rising trend in the final quarter of the year.

The Competition

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Apple only has one major competitor worldwide. Samsung’s production rose 11.5% to 60.1 million units. That gave it a global market share of 19.5%. Apple’s unit production rose 17.9% to 45.9 million. Its market share was 16.9%. Notably, Samsung has a much broader range of products than Apple, which helps its unit sales.

Most of the other smartphone competitors are companies based in China that have high sales there and do only modest business outside the country. Xiaomi produced 42.8 million phones, while Oppo produced 38.7 million and Vivo produced 24.5 million. (These 29 iconic brands completely collapsed and we forgot.)

The success of Chinese companies does pose a risk to Apple. China is the largest smartphone market in the world, but it is obviously a crowded one. Early iPhone 15 data from China showed business was fairly slow.

The research shows that the iPhone 15 has done well worldwide. Apple has more confirmation that it has another major success and support for that $3 trillion valuation.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
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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