Wal-Mart's post-Christmas iPhone sale
The mystery of Steve Jobs' iPhone retail strategy deepens with reports that Apple (AAPL) will begin selling its smartphones at Wal-Mart (WMT) three days after Christmas.
According to the Boy Genius Report, a blog with relatively reliable backchannel sources at AT&T, Apple will start with select Wal-Mart and Sam's Club outlets on Dec. 28, and eventually roll the iPhone out to 2,500 Wal-Mart owned stores.
The deal, if confirmed, would represent the fourth major expansion of the iPhone's retail presence outside Apple's own 200-plus stores — first to AT&T's (T) 2,000 retail outlets, then to nearly 1,000 Best Buy (BBY) outlets (see here), and then to the tens of thousands of points of sale (many of them no more than mom-and-pop kiosks) that carry iPhones for Apple's overseas partners.
This is a move of different magnitude. Wal-Mart is the world's largest retail chain — by far — with more than 7,000 mega-stores around the world and some 2.1 million employees. It finished its last fiscal year with nearly $380 billion in sales –Â earning it the No. 1 slot in the Fortune 500.
All of which raises the question of timing. If you're going to bring the iPhone to Wal-Mart, why not do it before Christmas — as originally rumored — rather than after?
Below the fold: An AT&T memo with a timeline of the Wal-Mart rollout, as posted Wednesday by the Boy Genius Report:
