Rumor: Initial sales of Apple's Verizon iPhone 4 below expecations

A new report that purports to show initial sales of the Verizon iPhone 4 claims that device's launched failed to meet the expectations of both Apple and Verizon.

Boy Genius Report cited an alleged Apple source on Wednesday in a report that claims first-week Verizon iPhone sales performed "a little under what Apple and Verizon anticipated." The source also provided figures that claim to show sales totals from five Apple stores, showing that Verizon iPhone sales by the device's fifth day of availability barely exceeded AT&T.

The figures purported to be from five Apple stores include "two very, very prominent" locations, and show in-store sales of 909 Verizon iPhones on the device's first day of availability, compared to 539 AT&T handsets. By the next Monday, the stores allegedly sold a collective total of 711 Verizon iPhone 4 models, while 618 handsets were sold on AT&T's network.

The site also claimed that online pre-orders between Verizon and Apple totaled about 550,000 units. Neither Apple nor Verizon have announced sales figures for the handset, which went on sale Feb. 10, though first-day preorders for existing Verizon customers quickly sold out. In addition, the carrier said that the iPhone 4 broke its sales records in just 2 hours.

Wednesday's report also claims that 30 percent of Verizon iPhone buyers were Android users switching to Apple's handset, while just over a quarter were coming from Research in Motion's BlackBerry platform. Just 14 percent of Verizon iPhone buyers were said to be AT&T iPhone owners switching carriers.

Apple's silence on Verizon iPhone 4 sales stands in contract to the initial debut of the iPhone 4 last June, when Apple revealed that it sold 1.7 million handsets in just the first three days of availability. This month's debut of the CDMA iPhone 4 was on just one carrier, while last year's GSM iPhone 4 was introduced in the U.S., France, Germany, the U.K. and Japan.

Various accounts from across the U.S. indicated that lines at Verizon and Apple stores were modest when the CDMA iPhone 4 went on sale earlier this month. RBC analyst Mike Abramsky said that checks with 40 different Verizon retail stores found that the launch was healthy but not a "blowout."

The analyst has forecast that Apple will sell one million of the Verizon iPhone 4 in its first week of availability. As of Wednesday, customers had a total of six full days to buy the handset at a retail store.


Apple Insider