Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says the weekend sales of the iPhone 5s and 5c may have come close to a 50/50 split due to the limited supply of the flagship iPhone 5s.
Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities said this week that of the 9 million iPhones Apple sold last weekend, he estimates between 3.5 million and 4.5 million were of the high-end iPhone 5s. That means between 4.5 million and 5.5 million would have been of the polycarbonate-backed iPhone 5c.
We have to rely on estimates for information like this, as Apple doesn’t release sales figures for individual models.
With the launch of two iPhone models this year, Apple beat it’s previous record of 5 million units with ease. 5 million iPhone 5 units were sold on opening weekend in 2012.
While Kuo’s estimate are quite different from figures published earlier this week by Localytics, which claimed the 5s was 3.4 times more popular than the 5c, Kuo explained the differences as their figures were based on activation, while his are based on production numbers.
“From Apple’s viewpoint, production, sell-in, sell-through and activation are different things,” he explained. “Since iPhone 5s is in shortage now, numbers of production, sell-in, sell-through and activation should be very close.”
Kuo sees the currently constrained supply of the iPhone 5s improving, saying he expects the flagship handset to be the “main contributor” to total iPhone shipments during the upcoming holiday season.
