Seth Godin, best-selling author of business books has just launched an iPhone Challenge on his blog. The challenge is to predict how many iPhones will Apple actually sell. It reminds me of an all-in situation in the game of Poker. The game of Poker because in this case too one has enough information available to take an informed prediction and if you haven't someone can always call your bluff.
There has already been a lot of chatter and predictions on how the revolutionary iPhone will perform once it is available in the stores in June.
Steve Jobs mentioned in his Keynote address that Apple was eyeing 1% market share in 2008 of the mobile phone market of almost a billion phones which is 10 million phones.
Guys at AT&T seem quite optimistic as they had already received one million enquiries on iPhone within 2 months after the announcement by Steve Jobs in the Keynote address in Jan.
There are some pessimistic views by folks at Microsoft (nothing too surprising), Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gives the iPhone no chance to get a significant market share, while some others in Microsoft think the iPhone will be a great music phone but isn't smart enough for business users.
In one of the small surveys of 500 high school students at 11 schools, 25% of students who were aware of the new Apple iPhone (of which 85% of 500 students knew about it) where willing to pay $500 or more.
The latest as of May 1st, 07 is that as per a survey carried out by Norwalk, CT market research firm, Markitecture only 6% of prospective customers currently state they expect to lay out the cash required to buy the Apple iPhone. As the survey itself points out, a 6% tally in the mobile phone industry is quite a healthy percentage.
So based on all the facts and figures, in my opinion, the iPhone will be a success and sell at least 3 million iPhones in 2007 and will either meet the target of 10 million or exceed it by 2008. The 2007 target are based on the assumption that the iPhone will be available in the stores sometime in June and Europe launch in October.
We will check back in a year's time to see everyone's hands (I mean predictions), hopefully I am not the one caught making the bluff.
What do you think?
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As we now know, Apple did like 4M units in 2007. The question I have is this, how many units will sell in Europe. I think 3G is an important part of that market and I doubt Apple can push the iPhone up that hill with just EDGE.
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