Apple’s goal of 10 million iPhones to be sold in 2008 has been called everything from ‘optimistic’ to ‘crazy’. And this is looking to be truth. The fourth quarter of 2007 (with the holiday season) yeilded sales of about 180,000 iPhones per week. This comes out to 7.9 million units a year. Not only is this too low to hit the 10 million mark but this was the busiest quarter Apple has had since the launch of the iPhone, and things are now slowing down.
The only solution I can see to drive iPhone sales up is Apple’s iPod marketing solution. Cut the price a bit and release a new model every couple of months that looks cooler and has more features. I would guesstimate that somewhere around 15% of iPod users buy the new thing every time its released, and 20% more buy a new model once a year or so. If they could drive new iPhones to become trendy like this they may have a shot.
My second bit of advice would be to drop the carrier plan in emerging markets. Its working okay in the US but if they opened it up to all providers in far eastern markets where there is currently no iPhone support I think they could crank up maybe a million or so sales over the year.
