View Poll Results: What will Q1 sell through be?

Voters
75. You may not vote on this poll
  • 0.5 mill or less

    4 5.33%
  • 0.5 to 1.0 mil

    27 36.00%
  • 1.0 mil to 1.5 mil

    25 33.33%
  • 1.5 to 2.0 mil

    5 6.67%
  • 2.0 mil to 2.5 mil

    7 9.33%
  • 2.5 mil to 3.0 mil

    3 4.00%
  • 3.0 mil to 3.5 mil

    0 0%
  • 3.5 mil +

    1 1.33%
  • Didn't think about it

    1 1.33%
  • I honestly think it's over 5 million

    2 2.67%
  1. kfh227's Avatar
    UPDATE:
    I messed up the wording. The intent was to ask how many phones would BBRY report as sell through when asked at the conference call on March 28th. Which means fiscal Q4.

    ORIG:
    This is a very rough guess on current Z10 sales. This is my guess.

    Please provide your thoughts. Crackberry Kevin, care to chime in

    Regarding UK:
    One anecdote is that UK carriers seem to be saying that 5 Z10 sales a day is typical. If that is also true for Canada, that means the 5000 or so outlets in the UK and Canada have sold 5 phones a day since release (along with an initial spike). So if you assume 5 sales a day at 5000 outlets over 30 days (25 in reality but this covers initial spike), that's 750K Z10s. A recent article alluded to the fact that an additional 200K Z10s have sold through business sales channels. So, there are probably over 1 million sold in the UK and Canada combined at this point. With 45 million smartphone customers in those two countries, that is already 2.2% market penetration. Not bad for 30 days.

    FWIW: Estimates of production are:
    Dec: 500L
    Jan: 1-2 million (1.5 mil for arguments sake)
    Feb: 2 million (we know that production has increased straight out of Thorsten Heins mouth)

    So, they manufactured 4 million Z10s so far as an estimate. The unknown is that no one knows how many are sitting in warehouses in the USA. Say 1 million are. That means 3 million have already gone to carriers who can barely keep them on shelves. If 90% of those have sold, that's 2.7 million of sell through at the end of the fiscal quarter.

    So, maybe 2.3 to 3.3 million of sell through?

    Does this make sense?
    Last edited by kfh227; 02-26-13 at 09:08 PM.
    sonbuster likes this.
    02-25-13 09:27 PM
  2. Bbnivende's Avatar
    No support for 5 per store per day in Canada. 100,000 seems to be a good first three weeks.
    02-25-13 09:38 PM
  3. Luke Barrie's Avatar
    Ive seen a few of these in the wild already. Not enough for a true indicator, but I have the impression things are moving well and will continue to accelerate
    02-25-13 09:50 PM
  4. bobshine's Avatar
    It's not that complicated to estimate the sales. Here is my suggestion : we all inquire at our local store how many units they sold on the first day and how many they had been selling on average per day since then.

    Afterward we figure out the approximate first day sales and the average daily sales after.

    Here is my contribution: I know for a fact the flagship Bell store in Montral had 60 Z10 on the first day. 30 were sold within the first hour and the rest were reserved and probably pick up or sold during the day.

    Posted via CB10
    02-25-13 10:27 PM
  5. Dapper37's Avatar
    2.3 to 3.3 sell IN seems reasonable.
    1 to1.5 million SOLD is my guess! That would be a fantastic number
    02-26-13 01:53 AM
  6. greggebhardt's Avatar
    OK who voted for OVER 5 million? LOL!
    02-26-13 07:42 AM
  7. huiohuio's Avatar
    Numbers thrown around here are out of touch with reality. Not that many places have the device yet, so sell-through (or even sell-in) in the millions would be similar to Apple or Samsung numbers. Not to mention it's hard to believe BBRY produced that many devices without contracting a Foxconn-equivalent. Increasing production from 500k to 2million isn't like flipping a switch. It's not done overnight.
    02-26-13 07:56 AM
  8. Bbnivende's Avatar
    The poll is confusing (to me).
    Sell through is the ratio of the quantity of goods sold by a retailer to the quantity originally delivered to it wholesale.

    Are you asking for units sold to customers or shipped to stores for sale ?
    02-26-13 08:39 AM
  9. Sqoon's Avatar
    We are looking at 500k realistically, you think people would learn to manage their expectations after what happened with the launch.

    Posted via CB10
    tiziano27 and jimmyzzz like this.
    02-26-13 08:53 AM
  10. meltbox360's Avatar
    A million is really not overly optimistic. Consider playbook sales in its first quarter. And there were no previous blackberry tablet loyalists to drive sales faster. My 2c
    Acumenight likes this.
    02-26-13 09:21 AM
  11. kcdist's Avatar
    This is a very rough guess on current Z10 sales. This is my guess.

    Please provide your thoughts. Crackberry Kevin, care to chime in

    Regarding UK:
    One anecdote is that UK carriers seem to be saying that 5 Z10 sales a day is typical. If that is also true for Canada, that means the 5000 or so outlets in the UK and Canada have sold 5 phones a day since release (along with an initial spike). So if you assume 5 sales a day at 5000 outlets over 30 days (25 in reality but this covers initial spike), that's 750K Z10s. A recent article alluded to the fact that an additional 200K Z10s have sold through business sales channels. So, there are probably over 1 million sold in the UK and Canada combined at this point. With 45 million smartphone customers in those two countries, that is already 2.2% market penetration. Not bad for 30 days.

    FWIW: Estimates of production are:
    Dec: 500L
    Jan: 1-2 million (1.5 mil for arguments sake)
    Feb: 2 million (we know that production has increased straight out of Thorsten Heins mouth)

    So, they manufactured 4 million Z10s so far as an estimate. The unknown is that no one knows how many are sitting in warehouses in the USA. Say 1 million are. That means 3 million have already gone to carriers who can barely keep them on shelves. If 90% of those have sold, that's 2.7 million of sell through at the end of the fiscal quarter.

    So, maybe 2.3 to 3.3 million of sell through?

    Does this make sense?
    OK....Although your heart is in the right place, you're getting a few things confused.

    Your poll asks what will the Q1 sell through be. Q1 2014 doesn't start until March 3rd, and covers the three months March-May 2013......based on those dates, and based on 'Sell-through" vice 'Shipped', I voted 2-2.5 Million.....

    However.....your calculations seem to be based on Q4 2013, which ends March 2nd. Remember, BBRY fiscal year is not the same as the Gregorian Calendar year. If your poll was based on that, I would have chosen 500k to 1 Million.
    02-26-13 09:56 AM
  12. kfh227's Avatar
    With most votes going to 500K to 1.5 million, I suppose that I am falling prey to confirmation bias in my own assumptions.

    I guess that even if that early number of 500K in December was constant for 3 months and 90% have sold, that is still 1.3 million or so phones. This would assume that phones are not warehoused in the USA.

    I really do view 1.3 million as a low ball estimate though. I think it is more.
    02-26-13 06:13 PM
  13. Bbnivende's Avatar
    OK....Although your heart is in the right place, you're getting a few things confused.

    Your poll asks what will the Q1 sell through be. Q1 2014 doesn't start until March 3rd, and covers the three months March-May 2013......based on those dates, and based on 'Sell-through" vice 'Shipped', I voted 2-2.5 Million.....

    However.....your calculations seem to be based on Q4 2013, which ends March 2nd. Remember, BBRY fiscal year is not the same as the Gregorian Calendar year. If your poll was based on that, I would have chosen 500k to 1 Million.

    I agree we need a clearer poll . Should be number sold in Q4- 2013.
    02-26-13 07:11 PM
  14. kfh227's Avatar
    Ahhh crap, I got the wording messed up. Meant fiscal Q4, not calendar Q1. Oh well.
    02-26-13 09:06 PM
  15. playbookster's Avatar
    Ive never seen a Windows phone.. ever. I live in Vancouver Canada and yet Nokia apparently sold 4.5 million of them last quarter. To who?? Ive spotted 4 BB10 phones so far.
    Acumenight and sonbuster like this.
    02-26-13 09:11 PM
  16. David Fu's Avatar
    I work at a hedge fund focusing on telecoms and we have substantial experience running sales estimates. Currently we track both the Lumia line and Z10. In fact, we use this forum for anecdotes and channel checks in lieu of sending analysts overseas. I can tell you for sure any q4 sell-through estimate >1mm is very unrealistic. Sell-in, now that's a different story. They could easily be at 1-1.5mm in carrier shipments already due to the large number of countries they're launching in right around the Feb 28 accounting deadline. Personally, I have sell-through ( pegged around 600-800k for Feb.

    Here are some facts that I find useful when running estimates:

    Canada: 3mm smartphones sold per quarter, with iPhone accounting for 30% (~1mm)
    UK: 5mm smartphones sold per quarter, iPhone 30% as well

    If we're VERY generous and assume the Z10 gets 30% of Canada's sales and 20% of the UK, we're talking a little less than 700k in 1 month. Throw in another 100k for other countries that have recently launched and you get to a max of 800k sell-through. We are long BBRY, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here - you can't expect a single phone to be running multi-million sales per month with such limited rollout at this point.
    joe.miller, Rsyl, fedakd and 7 others like this.
    02-26-13 10:35 PM
  17. Zarpan's Avatar
    I've collected a bunch of info from various legitimate sources (Comscore, retailer sites, BlackBerry quotes), and my best guess for UK sales is around 270k-285k units by March 2nd. This does not include business channel sales, which I know very little about.

    UK:
    The Z10 sold more than the Samsung Galaxy S3 at launch. Launch period was undefined, but assume that they were measuring first week sales since they used first week for their 3x better than their next UK launch quote. The Galaxy S3 sold around 90,000 units in the week after launch, so Z10 sales should be somewhere north of that.

    Sales for the Z10 seem to have slowed a bit since, but various sites (Carphone Warehouse, Uswitch, Phones 4 U) still put it as the 4th or 5th best selling phone (behind some iPhone and Galaxy variants). We'll say that sales for the Z10 might be 40-50% of the IPhone 5 or S3 now, so say 40,000 per week.

    If sales were 100,000 in the first week, 70,000 in the second week, and 40,000 in subsequent weeks, we'd be at around 270,000 units in UK sell-through by March 2nd.

    The other way to approach this is via looking at BB's subscriber base. There are currently about 4.2 million UK BlackBerry subscribers. I think typically about 4-6% of a smartphone platform's base chooses a new phone each month. Prior to BB10, the data for BlackBerry looked something like 2% choosing a Curve, 1% other BB devices, 2% other platforms. With Apple's launches, they've gotten upwards of 10% of their base to choose a new phone after launch. Assuming that BB's launch attracted some significant pent up demand, but not as much as with an Apple launch, 8% may be a good figure to go with. Perhaps the split is now 4.5% Z10, 1.5% BB7 devices (Curve still seems to be selling well), 2% other platforms, so we'd expect Z10 sales to BB users to be around 190,000 units.

    33% of Z10 sales in the UK are to users of other platforms, so combining the two parts would give us 285,000 units sold in the UK over one month.

    I'll get around to posting the Canadian and UAE info when I have time, but I'd agree with David Fu's 600k-800k range as being reasonable, at least for consumer market sales. Personally I think that is a very impressive number given the limited time frame and geographic availability.
    02-27-13 03:50 AM
  18. kfh227's Avatar
    I still have a hard time believing that sell through is under 1 million. David made a good rational argument though.

    I guess I don't see how with such great demand, why z10s would be sitting in the warehouses of places like rogers.

    If BBRY actually manufactured 3 million so far, where are they all?
    02-28-13 10:51 PM
  19. David Fu's Avatar
    No way they manufactured 3mm, that seems to be a rumor started by someone on this forum. Let's look at the math here: 3mm phones x $250 per phone = $750mm!! Remember BBRY only has 2.9bn in cash on their balance sheet and approx. 1.2-1.4bn is set aside for advertising this year. They can't afford to be blowing almost a billion on inventory in pre-launch period.

    Come to think of it, I've been seeing so many crazy "guesstimates" on this forum lately I might decide to write up a thread on this.

    Jeffries did a check at the Foxconn plant in Asia, and they believe production was ~500k in Dec, and 1mm in January. Roughly in line with what you posted at the top. That puts them at 1.5mm available for sell-in to carriers at launch, which would certainly explain the worldwide shortages. Remember that units produced in Feb are just on their way to carriers now.
    02-28-13 11:06 PM
  20. nquyen's Avatar
    I work at a hedge fund focusing on telecoms and we have substantial experience running sales estimates. Currently we track both the Lumia line and Z10. In fact, we use this forum for anecdotes and channel checks in lieu of sending analysts overseas. I can tell you for sure any q4 sell-through estimate >1mm is very unrealistic. Sell-in, now that's a different story. They could easily be at 1-1.5mm in carrier shipments already due to the large number of countries they're launching in right around the Feb 28 accounting deadline. Personally, I have sell-through ( pegged around 600-800k for Feb.

    Here are some facts that I find useful when running estimates:

    Canada: 3mm smartphones sold per quarter, with iPhone accounting for 30% (~1mm)
    UK: 5mm smartphones sold per quarter, iPhone 30% as well

    If we're VERY generous and assume the Z10 gets 30% of Canada's sales and 20% of the UK, we're talking a little less than 700k in 1 month. Throw in another 100k for other countries that have recently launched and you get to a max of 800k sell-through. We are long BBRY, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here - you can't expect a single phone to be running multi-million sales per month with such limited rollout at this point.
    I agree with your rationale but again we can't look to the past for numbers because this new OS marks a new BlackBerry. Just because in the past the have sold a small amount does not mean this trend will continue. While I will admit 1 million+ is a bit ambitious it's not completely unreasonable.
    02-28-13 11:07 PM
  21. Kid Vibe's Avatar
    500 - 1 Mil~
    03-01-13 12:09 AM
  22. Zarpan's Avatar
    No way they manufactured 3mm, that seems to be a rumor started by someone on this forum. Let's look at the math here: 3mm phones x $250 per phone = $750mm!! Remember BBRY only has 2.9bn in cash on their balance sheet and approx. 1.2-1.4bn is set aside for advertising this year. They can't afford to be blowing almost a billion on inventory in pre-launch period.

    Come to think of it, I've been seeing so many crazy "guesstimates" on this forum lately I might decide to write up a thread on this.

    Jeffries did a check at the Foxconn plant in Asia, and they believe production was ~500k in Dec, and 1mm in January. Roughly in line with what you posted at the top. That puts them at 1.5mm available for sell-in to carriers at launch, which would certainly explain the worldwide shortages. Remember that units produced in Feb are just on their way to carriers now.
    I thought the $1.2-1.4 billion was for total launch costs including advertising and inventory build. $1.2 billion sounds like a lot for just advertising since Apple's advertising budget is said to be $1 billion or so across multiple product lines.
    fedakd likes this.
    03-01-13 12:42 AM
  23. kcdist's Avatar

    Jeffries did a check at the Foxconn plant in Asia, and they believe production was ~500k in Dec, and 1mm in January. Roughly in line with what you posted at the top. That puts them at 1.5mm available for sell-in to carriers at launch, which would certainly explain the worldwide shortages. Remember that units produced in Feb are just on their way to carriers now.
    Might want to fact check this one......My Z10 was proudly Made in Mexico......others seem to be made in Hungary
    fedakd likes this.
    03-01-13 09:14 AM
  24. sonbuster's Avatar
    great insights from all respondents. let's all agree it's more than 300K
    Shanerredflag and kfh227 like this.
    03-01-13 11:25 PM
  25. VeGiTo's Avatar
    No way they manufactured 3mm, that seems to be a rumor started by someone on this forum. Let's look at the math here: 3mm phones x $250 per phone = $750mm!! Remember BBRY only has 2.9bn in cash on their balance sheet and approx. 1.2-1.4bn is set aside for advertising this year. They can't afford to be blowing almost a billion on inventory in pre-launch period.

    Come to think of it, I've been seeing so many crazy "guesstimates" on this forum lately I might decide to write up a thread on this.

    Jeffries did a check at the Foxconn plant in Asia, and they believe production was ~500k in Dec, and 1mm in January. Roughly in line with what you posted at the top. That puts them at 1.5mm available for sell-in to carriers at launch, which would certainly explain the worldwide shortages. Remember that units produced in Feb are just on their way to carriers now.
    So you agree that they probably produced roughly 2.5M including Feb? And given that most retailers are only getting a part of their orders filled (e.g. see anecdotes from Canada, India), it's not unreasonable to say that almost every unit produced is being shipped. That works out to 2M+ shipped for Q4. Sounds pretty crazy compared to market expectations... Are we in for a huge surprise later this month?

    Sell through could be much less given that they were launching in many markets near the end of Feb and units could be in transit/stored in warehouses on the cut-off date.
    kfh227 likes this.
    03-05-13 04:23 PM
29 12

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