Thursday, July 24, 2008

The attraction of the iPhone to AT&T

The release of AT&T's quarterly results offered some insight about how important the iPhone is to their long term wireless strategy. First, compared to last year, the company sold twice the number of iPhones. Most stores are facing backlogs in demand that can stretch to three weeks. CEO Randall Stevenson said "customer response has been everything we had anticipated and more."

Smartphone customers produce about double the average revenue than traditional users - in part because of the added data plans. In an industry which many observers had argued had become commoditized (phones were approaching almost a zero cost and slower growth) this segment is a bright spot.

By the way in Apple's quarterly release, they sold 717,000 phones during the completed quarter which added $419 million to the bottom line (although some of the iPhone revenue is deferred). In the first 10 days of the Application store - 25 million new applications were downloaded (I contributed 15 to that total) which will only increase net traffic.

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