It’s been mostly doom and gloom where iPhone sales and forecasts are concerned, but one analyst believes that the iPhone 7 could see record sales in September, reports Business Insider. BMO Capital Markets analyst Tim Long says the reason is because such a high proportion of existing iPhone owners currently have a model two or more years old.
While he’s predicting a huge number, the underlying figures would seem to support his contention that we can expect a marked uptake in sales even if this year’s model is less visually distinctive than we’d usually expect from a brand new model …
Twenty-five percent of the “installed user base” is poised for an upgrade, Long believes — an audience of 120 million phones. BMO’s Long went back through the history of all iPhone sales and calculated that on average, 17% of users upgrade as soon as the next year’s model comes out; 58% upgrade a year after that; and 22% the year after that. Only 2% of users hang on longer.
Long points out that those sitting on iPhones at least two years old amounted to 23% of the installed user-base when the iPhone 6 was launched, falling to just 19% as of the iPhone 6s, but has now hit 25% – hence his calculation of the potential size of the market this time around.
His actual number seems exceedingly unlikely given that Apple’s record to date is a touch under 75M phones, but it does provide a counterpoint to the most pessimistic forecasts out there – especially coming a day after a Nikkei report suggested (probably wrongly) that Apple might be moving to a three-year major upgrade cycle for the iPhone.
