Neil Hughes
As hand wringing over the $999-and-up pricing of the iPhone X continues, analysts at Kantar Worldpanel see the premium-priced handset as a wise move for Apple, after tracking marketshare gains for iOS in a number of key markets across the globe.
iOS marketshare surged 10.1 percent year over year in China in the three months ending in December, according to the latest data from Kantar. Gains were also seen in Germany (2.5 percent), Australia (1.2 percent), Japan (0.5 percent), and Spain (0.5 percent).
In response, Kantar Worldpanel CompTech Global Director Dominic Sunnebo said that Apple's decision to stagger the releases of the iPhone 8 series and iPhone X proved to be a "sound" strategy.
"With Apple's existing release structure, expectations would always be that the flagship model would be the top selling device in key developed markets, but with the premium price of iPhone X, real life affordability has come into play," Sunnebo said. "Given that in December iPhone X made it into the top three best-selling devices across all key regions, particularly in urban China where it was the top selling model, the pricing strategy seems to have been vindicated."
Specifically, Kantar found that the iPhone X was among the top three best selling devices in the month of December across Europe, in urban China, Japan, Australia, and the U.S.
The research firm also found that iOS loyalty reached a nw high in America, where 96 percent of iPhone owners who changed devices bought another model from Apple.
iOS did, however, post marketshare losses in some key countries. Apple's share was down by 2.4 percent in Great Britain, 0.7 percent in Italy, 0.5 percent in the U.S., and 0.4 percent in France.
Still, Kantar highlighted a strong performance by iOS across most markets, particularly China where Android's share fell 10.1 percent.
Android losses were mitigated in many other markets by the continued exit of Windows Phone. Microsoft's discontinued mobile platform now holds a share of less than 1 percent in all markets except Italy.
Apple will provide more insight on the performance of the iPhone X and the rest of the 2017 iPhone lineup in its quarterly earnings conference call, set to take place this Thursday, Feb. 1 after markets close.
Charles Martin
Malcolm Owen
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14 Comments
The pendulum always swings....Feb 1 can't come soon enough
Time for the pump.
Actually, yes, you should also post that...nice to do a post-mortem on all these claims to see who was "righ"t or "wrong"... or more accurately, whose darts better and randomly hit the right targets
In fact, perhaps Appleinsider could maintain an ongoing historical series/socrecard that collects all the claims by analysts over time, and how those claims compare against next quarter actuals. Tack on average share pricing (5-day perhaps) before and after analyst "events," and after each earnings report, and you'd have an interesting ongoing series.
1) Rumor
2) Implied Impact
3) Reported Performance
4) Actual Impact
In my News feed, CNBC claims price hurt performance, Kantar claims price vindicated. If there is anything about the whole fake news hysteria (we’ve always had fake news - see Kierkegaard’s words on the matter), it’s that the internet and social media expose how insubstantial most news actually is, how much of it is not an objective description of facts (more often then not unavailable, incomplete or lacking context), but rather editorialized opinion pieces wrapped up as objective reporting.
It’s all baloney. Apple is and will continue to do very well, as anybody who has been Long Apple since iPhone or the split can attest to.