The Mac's cyber Black Friday
Apple's in-store sales fell sharply from 2008, but its online store traffic soared
Apple's busy Fifth Ave. store. Photo: ped
A pair of reports from Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster tell the story.
The first, issued early Monday morning, gave the results of a headcount performed at three Apple (AAPL) retail stores on Black Friday, the traditional start of the holiday selling season. Although the stores were busy, his team counted an average of 8.3 Mac sales per hour, down 36% from the 13 Macs per hour they observed on the same day last year.
Munster's second note, sent nearly seven hours later, reported on comScore data indicating that sales at traffic on Apple's online store Friday was up 39% year over year.
"Apple's online store had a big day on Black Friday," Munster concludes, "offsetting the y/y decline in our retail store checks."
Based on NPD data that showed U.S. Mac sales up 7% year over year in October, Munster had previously estimated that Apple would sell 2.856 million Macs in the quarter that ends Dec. 26. That's up from 2.524 million Macs in the same quarter last year, but down from the record 3.053 million Apple sold last quarter.
UPDATE: More field checks and estimates below the fold from Kaufman Bros.' Shaw Wu, Thomas Weisel's Doug Reid and Deutsche Bank's Chris Whitmore.
[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]
33% of U.S. touchscreens are iPhones
Touchscreen phones are on fire, comScore reports, and Apple is leading the pack. For now.
Three months ending Aug. 2009. Source: comScore MobiLens
There's a thundering herd of imitators behind it, but Apple's (AAPL) iPhone still dominates that fastest-growing segment of the U.S. smartphone market, according to a comScore report issued Tuesday.
Touchscreen mobile phone adoption in the U.S. grew at a breakneck 159% rate last year, comScore reports, easily outpacing the 63% growth of the broader smartphone market.
By last August, nearly 34 million Americans were carrying smartphones, 23.8 million of them touchscreen devices. And of those touchscreen phones, 32.9% were iPhones.
“The iPhone clearly set the trend in the industry for touchscreen devices, so it’s no surprise that it has the largest share of the market,” said comScore VP Mark Donovan. “But as other players have entered the touchscreen market with compelling devices, competition is clearly heating up.”
Donovan mentioned Google's (GOOG) Android platform in particular, although the closest Android contender in August was the T-Mobile (DT) G1 running a distant seventh after two proprietary LG phones, the BlackBerry (RIMM) Storm, the Palm (PALM) Pre and the Samsung Instinct.
Below the fold, comScore's spreadsheets, including one that shows preference by age group. (The smartphone sweet spot seems to be ages 24 to 34.)
You iPhone. Me iPod touch.
What — besides a two-year, $2,000-plus commitment to AT&T (T) — makes a person who carries an iPhone different from one who's got an iPod touch?
From January to May, comScore tapped into AdMob's U.S. advertising network to conduct a survey of owners of both Apple (AAPL) mobile devices and drew some interesting conclusions, which it released Tuesday morning.
First, the comScore/AdMob survey, like last week's Forrester report, identified several ways both groups differ from the general population. For example,
- 70% are men
- Half use the mobile Web more than they read newspapers or magazines
- More than 40% use their mobile devices more often than their computers to visit the Internet
- More than 40% spend more time on the mobile Web than they do listening to the radio
But when the researchers drilled into their data, they discovered that iPhone and iPod touch owners occupy very different demographics. For example …
- iPhone owners are older. 69% of iPod touch users are between ages 13-24, while 74% of iPhone users are older than 25
- iPod touch owners are less wealthy. 78% of iPhone users have a household income of $25,000 or more, compared with 66% of iPod touch users
- iPhone owners have more kids. 46% of iPhone users have children while only 28% of iPod touch users do
- iPod touch owners are more likely … to be in the market for cellphones, clothes, TVs and other electronics
- iPhone owners are more likely … to spend money on travel, financial services and a new home
Most of these findings flow directly from the first: iPhone owners are older and therefor have more money, more kids, more need of financial services, etc. (The one thing most don't need is another cellphone.)
And you might think that this age difference flows directly from all those free iPod touches Apple handed out last summer — and will hand out again this summer — to college students buying MacBooks.
But Jason Spero, AdMob's North American managing director, thinks it has more to do with 1) the cost of that two-year commitment to AT&T, and 2) the big advertising campaign Apple ran last December pushing the touch — and the explosion of games that run on it — as the "funnest iPod ever," a campaign clearly pitched to younger users.
Spero says the effect of Apple's marketing push leaped out of their December data: an explosive, almost vertical spike in AdMob's iPod touch Web requests between Dec. 24 and Dec. 25. "The iPod touch became THE gift for Christmas," he says.
ComScore describes itself as a leader in measuring the digital world, and AdMob is the world's largest purveyor of mobile Web ads. ComScore used invitation banners to solicit respondents from AdMob's network and ended up interviewing 3,454 iPhone users and 3,848 iPod touch owners.
See also:
Below the fold: snapshots of the two demographics as reflected in a few of the comScore/AdMob graphics.
Apple was 5th busiest retail site on Cyber Monday
Apple.com was the exception in comScore's report on retail sales for Cyber Monday 2008, the biggest online shopping day in a year marked by global financial meltdown.
While its competitors were offering deep discounts to pull in recession-battered customers, Apple (AAPL) had already ended its Black Friday sale and by Monday was back to charging its usual premium prices for laptops, desktops and MP3 players.
Yet its online store still managed to grab the No. 5 spot in comScore's ranking of the top 20 most visited retail sites on Monday Dec. 1, handily beating not only Dell (DELL) and Hewlett Packard (HPQ), but such full-fledged retail outlets as Best Buy (BBY), Toys "R" Us and Circuit City (CC).
Apple.com drew nearly 3.7 million visitors that day, up 43% from November's somewhat depressed average. The big winner for Cyber Monday was eBay (EBAY), with nearly 13 million visitors, followed by Amazon (AMZN; 9.2 million), Wal-Mart (WMT; 6.7 million) and Target (TGT; 4.8 million).
Overall, according to comScore, online spending was up 15% from 2007, driven by a 22% increase in the number of buyers. But those buyers made 9% fewer purchases than last year, and they spent 5% less.
Below the fold: comScore's top 20 chart, its breakdown of e-commerce spending and, perhaps most usefully for tight-fisted shoppers, its ranking of the top 10 comparison shopping sites, in which Shopzilla.com was the big winner. More
