Some More iPhone Sales Stats to Chew On
Posted by geoffwhiting on December 8, 2007
French mobile phone service Orange said this week that it sold 30,000 iPhones in the first five days the unit was available.
Comparatively, T-Mobile in Germany said it sold 10,000 iPhones on November 9, the day it went on sale.
Sales figures from O2 in the UK are still unknown.
About 80% of Orange customers bought the iPhone under an Orange contract, similar to AT&T’s iPhone contract requirements in the US. Those customers paid €399 ($585) for their iPhone, the same price T-Mobile charges for its iPhones.
Orange also offers the iPhone for €549 ($800) with other types of contracts, or €649 ($950) without a contract. About 1,500 were sold without a contract, said an Orange spokesperson. There’s a €100 ($150) unlocking charge for any customer who buys an iPhone from Orange to use it on another operator’s network.
Orange is now the only one of Apple’s network operator partners to sell the iPhone unlocked. It has to, in order to comply with a French law forbidding businesses to sell items under a condition that a customer buys another certain item as well.
For a short time, T-Mobile offered unlocked iPhones for a monstrous €999 ($1,500) to adhere to a temporary court injunction. T-Mobile had been sued by rival operator Vodafone, which claimed that selling the phone tied to a two-year contract directly violated Germany’s consumer protection laws. This week, however, a court threw out the case and gave T-Mobile permission to sell the phone under contract.
Initial sales of the iPhone in Europe are trumped by its success in the US, of course, where Apple and AT&T sold 270,000 on the first weekend. But to put it in perspective, the US population is almost four times that of Germany, and around five times that of France.
