A top analyst has predicted a banner holiday season for Apple based on early sales figures for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus
"Apple will have a very strong holiday season," stated Carolina Milanesi , chief of research and head of U.S. business for Kantar WorldPanel Comtech. She analyzed sales data for the most recent three month sales quarter ending in September. "If all I have is the 12 days of (September) sales, what the iPhone 6 was able to do was quite remarkable," she said. Milanesi added that increased midtier competition from Motorola and LG were more likely to affect Samsung's bottom line as opposed to Apple's.
Interestingly, Kanter's research shows that Apple's share of the entire smartphone market actually fell by 3.3 percent in the quarter. This could be because users held off on buying new Apple phones in anticipation of the release of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus. But it's the stellar sales for the newly released devices that has Milanesi bullish on Apple's holiday prospects.
Milanesi also noted weak competition, especially from Samsung, whose high-end models like the Note 4 and Edge are not, in her opinion, major changes from their predecessors, and also have a limited supply available, as we reported recently.
She also stated that holiday sales should be brisk because the iPhone is always one of the most "gifted" smartphones during the holidays, with a "gift" being broadly defined as one person purchasing a phone for another person to use.
Interestingly, Milanesi reported that in Europe, the iPhone 6 outsold the iPhone 6 Plus by a 5-to-1 margin. While she said the iPhone 6 Plus has done "very well," she declined to give a ratio for the U.S. due to the limited sample size and says she sees the phablet category, which she defines as devices sporting a 5.5-inch screen size and above, as still limited. The category now has a 7 percent share of the entire U.S. smartphone market, which she felt she could see "growing to maybe 10 percent or 12 percent in the U.S., but that will take several quarters."
This appears to contradict T-Mobile CEO John Legere's recent revelation that the iPhone 6 Plus at one point accounted for more than half the sales of Apple's recently released smartphones at the carrier.
