Amazon will sell as many Kindles as they make, but the number they will make will not be the most they could make.
The logic of selling a product which has a profit model unrelated to the cost of goods sold is tricky. The incentives are different. The risk is not selling too few but selling too many.
For this reason I think the total number of new Fire units to be sold has already been determined by a production order. You cannot think about the business from a demand point of view. If the product would be free then the demand would be infinite. The decision about how many will be "sold" will depend on the goodwill of the producer.
What Amazon tries to do with the brand is ensure that the Fire is in the hands of its most ravenous consumers. That is why it's not sold in all markets or through all channels. They are sold through Amazon.com in the US (limited sales in UK as well). This is because a large number of the product in the hands of users who only use it for browsing or in areas where Amazon does not have content deals or where its ads are poorly targeted (e.g. India, Indonesia or Madagascar) would be a disaster. It may not be all that helpful to Google to have Android in those markets but as you would expect it's still a profitable business for Apple.
So one way to think of the Fire is as a promotional item (aka swag) for another business (Amazon.com). Using this frame of mind, assessing its "threat" to another business which charges for the product itself is like assessing whether free t-shirts from trade shows affect the sales of clothing or apparel in general. They do, but mostly the sale of cheap t-shirts. I doubt that people stop buying more functional clothing because they have hundreds of free t-shirts. And then there's the problem of looking like an advertisement.
This interview was conducted with Bruno Ferrari Editor of Exame magazine in Brazil.
First, do you have forecasts for tablet market share including Microsoft for next years? (Apple, Android, Amazon etc)?
I have some guesses but I don't think it's something that is defensible. Too many things can change. Fundamentally I believe Microsoft sees the tablet as a PC and intends to migrate a substantial portion of would-be PC customers to tablet forms. If they are successful then they preserve the existing PC user base and allow it to grow a bit.
In contrast Apple sees the iPad as a new type of device that is used for things not directly related to PC style computing. In that sense the iPad competes with PC non-consumption. It means people may own both a PC and an iPad and some will own only an iPad. The iPad will expand the market while taking share from the PC. Windows tablets will try to hold the Windows share steady.
How do you analyze Microsoft’s strategy with Microsoft Surface? Don’t you think they’re admitting themselves that Apple was right since the beginning?
We don't know the strategy yet. Without pricing and an idea of how the other OEMs will respond, I have more questions than answers. The fact that they are doing their own PC hardware does indicate that they see the industry architecture changing and that a large number of vendors offering hardware "choice" is not really the basis of competition in PCs. In other words, buyers are not willing to pay a premium for Windows because the hardware it's available on is offered in a wide range of options.
Do you think MS growth at tablet market will surpass the lost at PC (desktop and notebook) market in the next years?
This is a crucial question. It's possible that Windows 8 on tablets will create new markets, like the iPad has done and it could take the leading role in expanding computing in a post-PC era. However, to do this, Windows 8 and its successors need to be optimized to solve the new jobs people may have for mobile devices. They have to do this even though they need to sustain the old use cases and business models. To succeed Microsoft needs to "fork" the business model and create new ways of profiting from hardware and software. The rumors that Windows 8 RT devices will be sold at a loss is perhaps a hint that this is the plan.
Did you see the rumor of a 199 dollars Surface? If it’s true, do you think is a good strategy?
It all depends on what will be the alternate source of revenue. I assume there will be some sort of subscription service, taking a page from the telecom industry. Perhaps a mixture of Windows Live services (media, documents in the cloud and software updates). We have to see whether subscription computing makes sense for consumers.
How do you see the problem that MS is creating with its OEM by turning itself on a tablet maker?
There is a problem, of course. However here again the question is whether they are moving to an "ecosystem subscription" model and whether they want to offer revenue share to OEMs. If they offer something then Microsoft plays the role of the operator and device makers are paid some up-front subsidy in exchange for keeping their systems locked into the network.
One more questions: did you already estimate the shipments of Samsung Galaxy Tab since its launch?
Sorry, I don't have the Galaxy Tab estimate. However, here is what I found:
A week after its release, Samsung announced that they had sold 600,000 units. On the 4 December, it was reported that the 1 million mark was reached, two months after launch. However, an executive at Lenovo claimed that Samsung had only sold 20,000 out of the 1 million Galaxy Tabs that were shipped. In January 2011 Samsung announced they had shipped 2 million units to stores. In August 2012, actual sales figures were released in the patent infringement court case against Apple showing that a total of 725,000 Galaxy Tabs were sold through Q2 of 2012.
Last September I argued against the potential of the Kindle Fire acting as a low end disruption in the tablet market.
Now that the first version of the product has reached is end of life, it's time to review the discussion.
The first problem is finding out how well the product did. Amazon just released a statement that the Fire accounted for 22% of tablet sales in the US in the nine months it was available. The challenge becomes knowing how many total tablets were sold in the US during this time frame.
Fortunately we know the vast bulk of that total based on the Samsung v. Apple trial. Both Apple and Samsung submitted as evidence sales of the iPad and the Tab product lines in the US. The iPad added up to 16.14 million units (Q4'11 through Q2'12) and the Tab was 540k units. That makes the iPad and the Tab add up to about 16.7 million units. Assuming an additional 1 million units for the other (non-Kindle) total yields an estimate of 22.7 million tablet devices sold in the nine months ending June.
Applying the 22% claim to that total gives a Kindle sales total of 4.987 million. That's awfully close to a round number of 5 million.
Since Amazon admitted that they ended production prior to launching a replacement (and presumably did so quite early in order to drain inventory,) then we can safely assume that the original production order was 5 million units.
Five million Kindle Fire units becomes the first reliable estimate of Kindle sales (based on Apple, Samsung and Amazon supplied information rather than guesses from analysts.)
So the question now is whether this is consistent with the hypothesis that the Fire is disrupting the tablet business.
Bearing in mind that this 5 million total was reached with prominent placement on Amazon.com and a loss-leading pricing, I would conclude that this is not an auspicious start for a disruptive product.
As I argued nearly a year ago, the business model for the Kindle is limited to the footprint of the Amazon franchise, which is small internationally. Amazon itself implicitly admitted that the product was a US-only phenomenon. Further worry comes from the way the company approached production. It was not planning it as a maximization of reach into the market. What they did was order a batch production and then wait for it to be sold through.
Perhaps Amazon is being patient for growth, but I don't see a hunger for profit in this strategy. We know that Kindle probably lost money at the price charged. Perhaps it's on the order of $40 per unit. Five million units would imply a charge against the business of $200 million. Did Amazon earn a profit on content sales of $40 on each of those five million units? The margins on content sold through Amazon are so low that I have a hard time imagining that Fire users are that ravenous in their consumption.
We can put all of our products on the table you’re sitting at. Those products together sell $40 billion per year. No other company can make that claim except perhaps an oil company.
We are the most focused company that I know of, or have read of, or have any knowledge of.
We say no to good ideas every day; we say no to great ideas; to keep the number of things we focus on small in number.
Since then the only product that has been added to the kitchen table has been the iPad. The sales level however, has increased in proportions shown in the chart below.
The revenues are shown with their contributory products and the costs of those products. The payments for costs of sales as well as R&D, SG&A and Taxes are then subtracted revealing the Net Income (in green). This is done for the second quarters of 2010, 2011 and 2012.
Since Tim Cook made the analogy, the table holding the products has not gotten any bigger but the sales level has more than doubled while profits have nearly tripled.
In his talk he cited revenues of $40 billion (for the pervious year, 2009). In the last twelve months Apple's revenues were $148 billion.
Tim Cook went on:
I think this is so ingrained in our company that this hubris you talk about that happens to companies that are successful and sole role in life is to get bigger, I can tell you the management team at Apple would never let that happen. That's not what we're about. [We have a] Small list of things to focus on.
The irony is that by thinking small, Apple became the biggest company that ever was.
The trick to thinking small is the same as that of "focusing" which means saying no, a lot. I touched on this in February 2011. Focusing is the willful rejection of the Nobel-prize winning theory of portfolios.
From the wiki link above,
Diversification eliminates non-systematic risk, but at the cost of increasing the systematic risk. Diversification forces the portfolio manager to invest in assets without analyzing their fundamentals, solely for the benefit of eliminating the portfolio’s non-systematic risk (the CAPM assumes investment in all available assets). This artificially increased demand pushes up the price of assets that, when analyzed individually, would be of little fundamental value. The result is that the whole portfolio becomes more expensive and, as a result, the probability of a positive return decreases (i.e. the risk of the portfolio increases).
This theoretical view into asset management applies in spades to product portfolio management. The idea that it's better to spread one's bets and cover all segments is "safer" has been thoroughly debunked by Apple.
Understanding the "fundamentals" of a product is far more important than having lots of products for the sake of diversification alone.
The fundamentals of a product are knowing its job to be done and thus its requirements which, when well executed, will position it precisely and unambiguously on an opportunity.
Google, Microsoft and Apple all had reasonably good second quarters. Microsoft's revenues grew by 4%, Google's by about 22% and Apple by 23%. Apple's growth was disappointing but the other companies weren't. The revenues for the three companies are shown in the following charts:
I also showed the performance of each company's operating income in the bottom three charts.
Microsoft did declare a one-time write-off of $6.2 billion which it spent on aQuantive a few years ago. That was booked as contributing to a loss of $6.67 billion for its Online Services division. Without that one-time charge consolidate operating income would have grown at about 3.6%. Google's operating income grew at a rate of 11% and Apple grew (again, disappointingly) at 23.4%.
Apple's operating margin fell to 33.1% while Google's fell to 29.2%. Microsoft's margin evaporated due to the one-time charge. If we back that charge out, the margin would have slightly topped 35%.
Comparing the contribution (in operating income) for each division or product line (where possible) gives the following view:
I tried to remove some noise by isolating the iPhone and iPad and consolidating Microsoft overall and Google.
By also smoothing out seasonality with a four-period moving average we can observe the pattern of growth for the iPhone and iPad relative to the other companies' overall performance.
The crucial question remains if and when the iPad will be a bigger business than Google and/or Microsoft. The iPhone climbed over both some time ago.
One of the remarkable patterns associated with the iPad has been its growth rate. Looking at the ramp of the product relative to the iPhone and iPod touch reflects this sense of raised expectations:
At the same point in time, and adjusting for seasonality the iPad is outselling the iPhone by a factor of 3 and the iPod touch by a factor of about 5. This is also reflected in the installed base of devices, where the 84 million iPads sold through its first nine quarters is more than three times the iPhone base at a similar point in time.
Of course, the world of 2012 is different than the one from 2009 when 25 million iPhone sold. iPhones are available in far more points of sale and to many more buyers world-wide. But the interesting contrast is between the iPad and the iPod touch.
I've always maintained that the dynamic difference between the iPad and the iPhone is that it's unrestrained (and unsupported) by the operator channel and all that it implies. The iPad is a pure computing product whose means of communication is unregulated. That means transparency in pricing and transparency in distribution.
But so is the iPod touch.
The iPod touch is a "nano iPad" (or as detractors put it, the converse of that.) So shouldn't the iPod touch behave as the iPad?
We don't know exactly how the iPod touch behaves. We don't have specific figures on its sales. What you see in the charts above are my estimates for the iPod touch based on company statements that "about/above 50%" of iPods are touch versions. That and the cumulative sales totals that are occasionally reported.
However, we have received an unexpected morsel of data from the Samsung v. Apple trial that may help characterize the two products: US sales data. Having the US data and knowing/estimating the global data gives us an estimate of the international (ex-US) sales for all three products.
I indexed the three products to measuring quarters since launch. The pattern here is that the iPad diverges from the iPod touch in its international appeal. Since the iPad expanded internationally even faster than the iPhone, the issue is not only one of rapidity in appeal but also a qualitative difference. The iPod touch seems to have stabilized at 50% non-US sales while the iPhone is between 60% and 80% outside the US.
The iPad reached 60% non-US sales in its first year. Its last quarter was 70% outside the US.
So what's going on?
The characteristic value of the iPad is in its appeal to "computing non-consumers". Computing has come to mean media consumption, education, communication and entertainment. These jobs to be done are casually done with much more ease on an iPad. The iPod touch can do these jobs as well, but not as comfortably. The iPod touch is "absorbable" by younger consumers and typically they have their hiring done by their parents. Those parents are less likely to indulge where incomes are lower.
But the universal appeal of the iPad is evident in its global visibility. Like the tasks it performs, the iPad itself is becoming less of a mystery.
The second quarter showed continuing growth for Android with 19 points of share growth from a year ago. Only Windows Phone showed a gain y/y in share up 1.6 points to about 3%. In the same time, Bada lost half a point, iOS lost 2.1 points, RIM lost 7.2, Symbian 11.4.
The result is shown in the graph below:
I also show a "before-and-after" pair of pie charts which show the difference in smartphone platform market share from the same quarter three years ago. Android went from 3% share to 67% while Symbian went from 41% to 4% and RIM went from 19% to 5%. iOS increased its share from 13% to 17%.
If this trend continues Android could reach 50% of all phones sold in a few years. That's a run rate of 200 million per quarter. And it's likely that 100 million of those will be shipped by Chinese vendors.
However, looking at the global picture can also miss some important trends in local markets. Had one looked at the global smartphone business in 2005, the conclusion would have been that Symbian would be the dominant platform in perpetuity.
What affected the global market was a change in the US: the launch of iOS and thereafter of Android. The US, a smartphone backwater until then, became the most vibrant market and today it's the most penetrated and has the highest ratio of smart to non-smart of any of the major regions.
The curious thing about this vast market is that it's still not truly open. There are technology and political reasons why some platforms are permitted to sell in one region or not. The iPhone is not available on either the largest Chinese operator or on the largest Japanese one. It's largely absent from India because of distribution (i.e. subsidy) and much of South America. Even in the US, the iPhone is still, after five years, not available on one of the top four operators and has only reached another less than a year ago.
What intrigues me is what would the market look like if distribution were not an issue. What if there was equal choice to all buyers. We can't test this question directly but we can ask. But there is some pattern we can look at in the US data. Thanks to recent revelations at the Samsung vs. Apple trial we can see the effect of increasing distribution in the US.
The data on smartphone market share by carrier can be blended with data from carriers about iPhone activations (which are a proxy for sales, see note below) to give a more precise figure of market share in markets where iPhone participates.
For example, when the iPhone was only available on AT&T, one could measure iPhone market share vs. the global smartphone market, or the US smartphone market or within AT&T alone. Some assumed that the AT&T share would be reduced once the product would become available on Verizon or other US carriers. However there was no appreciable drop. Share in Q4 2010 was 63% at AT&T and it was 63% a year later after the iPhone was available for four quarters at Verizon.
So the share of iPhone within those operators which carry it tells a story independent of distribution.
The following graph shows the share of the iPhone vs. Samsung in the market defined by its availability. (I.e. the volumes of smartphones sold by AT&T throughout the time period, Verizon Q1 2011 to end and Sprint in Q4 '11).
The share of iPhone thus defined shows a slight decline but it's an overall number that is remarkably resilient as distribution increases and is remarkably high overall. Note that globally, the iPhone gets only about 17% share of smartphones--a value that has not varied greatly since mid 2009.
So at least in the US, on carriers where it's available, the iPhone is holding on to a significant share. In a global market it's expanding distribution but not yet covering the world. As a consequence it's keeping up with overall market growth and staying between 17% and 20% share.
The big question is what will happen if and when its availability matches that of Android in terms of points of sale. Or even that of BlackBerry or Symbian. Is America a different market from the rest of the world? It was different in being isolated while Symbian roamed globally. It was different in being a launch platform for BlackBerry and then iOS and then Android. But now that iPhone is beginning to be widely available there, will it be exceptional in how it rewards Apple?
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Note:
Activations data can be seen next to Apple's testimony of US sales in the following graph. Note that more phones were sold by Apple than were activated in total of the life of the product. 86 million sold and 80 million activated. This implies that an analysis based on activations undercounts the iPhone.
Because that is an estimate. Of the 104 million Android phones shipped in the quarter (itself an estimate from another, possibly different methodology), I could only account for 7 million actually reported. That figure comes from a close reading of an investor presentation from Sony. HTC does not report their shipment numbers. It stopped some time late last year. Neither does Motorola now that it's a part of Google. Huawei is silent except for setting targets and ZTE published a press release citing IDC's estimate of its own shipments.
But most glaring of all is the absence of any mention by Samsung of its performance. The company stopped reporting any data on either overall phone shipments or of smartphones within that total since Q3 2011. We may have been able to estimate Samsung if we had more competitor actuals, allowing us to back into a figure. But we don't.[1]
Which leaves us with IDC's estimate[2]. But the problem is that since the industry is growing so quickly it is very sensitive to assumptions. Consider how difficult it is for consensus estimates for Apple's iPhone shipments to come near the actuals--and that's for one quarter, and knowing all the previous quarters with precision. The absence of visibility into the assumptions made by market analysts (or their methods) should lower confidence in the results.
Consider that IDC specifies 50.2 million Samsung smartphones, implying an accuracy down to 100,000 units. Is this accuracy believable?
There is reason for doubt.
I start with the following graph:
It shows the estimates for Samsung global shipments (latter four quarters are estimates without the benefit of company reports.) I separated the component of shipments that Samsung reported as part of its submission to the Samsung v. Apple trial in California. Note that this (orange) segment consists of most US smartphone shipments. It's not all US Samsung shipments. It notably excludes the Note, the latest Nexus and the Galaxy SIII.
Without these "non-accused" phones, it would appear that Samsung's US volumes dropped to 4% of global totals from a 10% average[3]. In order to return to 10%, the US totals would need to be adjusted as shown below:
I added 1.5 million units in Q1 and 4 million units in Q2 (to account for Galaxy SIII).
So far this seems consistent with the total estimated global shipments of 50.2 million from IDC. US units would result in 12% of global shipments.
However, there is more data we can test against. First, we are also given pricing for the US phone portfolio, or at least we have revenue per unit sold. This allows us to get an idea of what revenues can be obtained for the smartphones in the US, and possibly world-wide[4]. Knowing prices for smartphones and knowing global sales (which Samsung reports) and finally knowing global total phone shipments allows us to price the average non-smart phone.
Excluding the non-accused smartphones, the average revenue per smartphone in the US for Samsung in Q2 was $339. Adding in the estimated Galaxy SIII (4 million) at an average price of $470 gives a new "ASP" of $413.
This is where the analysis goes off the rails.
If we assume the global ASP is equal to the US ASP and knowing everything else about the mix of smartphones (54% of total) and revenues (as reported) yields a negative ASP for feature phones. Assuming the revenue figure is correct, either the number of smartphones is wrong (50.2 million) or the global ASP ($413) is wrong. The total phone number is also an analyst estimate which can be called into question.
There are many assumptions being multiplied here so I have very low confidence in the result, but we should ask "what do you need to believe" in order for the 50.2 million figure to be real. The following scenario for example has to be true:
Global Samsung phone shipments total 93 million units (which means 42.8 million feature phones sold as well as the 50.2 million smartphones).
6 million smartphones shipped into the US, equivalent to about 50% increase y/y, roughly in-line with market growth
4 million Galaxy SIII shipped (but not necessarily sold through) at an ASP of $450. This results in a US total smartphone ASP of $413
The global smartphone ASP is significantly lower (at 80% of the US or $330)
Global revenues of $18.14 billion is essentially all from phones
Global feature phones will have an average price of $36
If these conditions are met then it's possible that 50.2 million Samsung smartphones did ship.
The figure for feature phone ASP is difficult to accept as it would be lower than Nokia's. Also, the low global smartphone ASP is also difficult to accept but it might be possible to find a scenario with the above variables which makes the 50.2 million figure believable.
Unfortunately this is an unsatisfying analysis. I could propose another figure to answer the question in the title, based perhaps on more "believable" assumptions. But I have no means to defend my assumptions. The only option I have remaining is to caution that the total smartphones shipment estimate for Samsung remains precarious. The new evidence from the US trial places more doubt on it but it is not enough to disqualify it entirely.
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Notes:
This cone of silence over 93% of the most popular mobile platform is somewhat puzzling in contrast to the perfect information we are used to having about iOS, BlackBerry and even Symbian. It seems that the more open a platform, the less is revealed about its market performance. This extends to the licensed Windows Phone whose shipments are only revealed through Nokia's reporting of Lumia shipments.
In the PC market, vendors also selectively publish their units. The norm is, however, not to. As a result IDC et. al. are the only sources for global market data. However, the PC market can be sampled more easily than the phone market. PC retail measurement methods are more reliable compared with all the points of sale for phones.
Note that Apple sells about 30% of iPhones in the US.
Apple's pricing world-wide is very consistent with pricing in the US which makes sense from a channel management point of view. One would not want to create incentives for cross-border arbitrage of phones.
Samsung has been selling smartphones for a relatively short time. Although the company sold Windows Mobile, Linux and PalmOS during the last decade, it did not gain significant volumes until it began selling Android phones in 2010 with strong operator support.
That support was substantial in the US. The company crashed the Android party in mid 2010 with its Galaxy brand. Trial evidence reveals that the sales level for Galaxy S1 series phones burst out of the gate taking Samsung from 90k units to 2.5 million units in one quarter.
The following graph shows the unit shipments recorded by Samsung for a set of US smartphones.
Note that the profile of sales volume shows a cyclicality with respect to product launches. Each new generation overlaps with previous generations and "fills in" while the older generation product tails off in sales. This is standard portfolio strategy. It also shows the cycle time of launches is approximately four quarters. As the S1 was four quarters old, the SII launched and the SIII follows after four quarters of SII.
What is surprising is that the overall sales volume is not growing. At least for the products catalogued (which exclude the Note) growth for the last four quarters has been: 5%, 34%, 31%, -53%. These are in stark contrast to the iPhone pattern shown in the outline bars behind Samsung's.
The iPhone ramped slowly in 2007 and 2008 and has been showing remarkable generational growth.
Perhaps it's still early and Samsung SIII product will ramp up as the contemporary iPhones do, but if it doesn't we have entertain the possibility that the iPhone does not compete along the same basis.
What does it mean to compete on a different basis?
The basis of competition is the aspect of an offering for which a customer is willing to pay a premium price. It's hard to know (or to put your finger on) what the basis actually is, but we can test whether it's the same by measuring whether two products capture prices the same way. If one product that seems to resemble another can obtain price advantage consistently, then perhaps it's being bought for a different reason.
To test this, I produced the following chart showing the prices that Samsung's phones have been able to capture through their lifetimes; and the same for the iPhone.
I've narrowed the analysis to the first four quarters and summarized the price erosion across all the products as well:
[Note: iPhone 4S, Skyrocket, T-Mobile Galaxy SII showing only three quarters]
As mentioned, it's still early perhaps, but the pattern for the iPhone has been different.
Samsung's pattern is not unusual. I've seen similar pattern for almost all Nokia products. Prices drop. It's a standard industry phenomenon.
Therefore the question is not perhaps what is Samsung's basis of competition: it's the same as the overall phone industry. The question is what is the basis of competition for the iPhone.
In a footnote to my last post on Apple Retail (The face and the brand) I used data on operating performance from Apple and an assumption about employee salaries (which turned out to be low) to estimate that about 7% of Apple store sales are spent on "cost of service" or the operational expenses, which consist of mostly employee salaries.
An updated view of this store income statement (on a per-visitor basis) is shown below:
To summarize the logic, during the last quarter Apple received $49.2 in store revenues per visitor. Knowing the retail profit ($10.46/visitor) and knowing the time spent per visitor (14 minutes, itself derived from the number of full time equivalent employees--41,000 or 112 per store) and assuming the cost of that time in employee salaries ($15/hr including benefits), gives us an estimate of the service cost ($3.55/visitor) and therefore the cost of goods sold ($35.2/visitor).
Now I want to focus on this ratio of service cost/sales which turns out to be about 7%[1] and ask whether this is significant or revealing.
In order to do this we have to understand that most stores, especially electronic goods retailers, don't spend this much on salaries. They do spend quite a bit on commissions however. From a post on the subject, I gathered the following commission rates for various retailers:
Phone stores: $25 for activations, 10% of accessory sales
Beauty/handbags at department store counters: 3% to 5%
Shoes, appliances, electronics: 8 to 10%
Furniture: 2% to 6% (low rate includes salary)
Real estate: 2.5% to 3% (no salary)
Car salesmen: 30% after dealer costs
Now 7% to 10% that Apple spends on salaries starts to make some sense, economically. It's roughly equivalent to what another retailer might spend out of their sales on the help.
The difference is that Apple does not pay commissions and that cost is spread over a far larger headcount of staff. Roughly speaking it implies that Apple hires five times as many employees (consider how many people you might see in an Apple store where the average is 112 and in a similarly sized Polo Ralph Lauren outlet) as would be needed to "just sell stuff."
The trade-off seems to be that Apple will pay a modest wage to a hundred employees rather than a commission to a handful. The trade-off is pretty even since the profits would be the same.
But they wouldn't be.
The difference is that what the customer buys is different. Or, put another way, a store bursting with staff is hired by the customer to do a different job than a store filled with a handful of "salesmen".
Even though the economic ratios are similar, the result is that visitors at an Apple store are made to feel they're getting a service rather than being sold a product.
And that's the key to there being very many visitors. And, incidentally, they happen to buy more things. And also incidentally they come to value the brand more.
It also leads to a virtuous cycle. More visitors means more visibility for the store and that leads to more visitors still, and that leads to more employees.
So a simple decision to hire in proportion of a level of service rather than a level of sales leads to completely different bottom line results.
That's not to say that this model is transplantable. The entire system depends on having the right goods to sell and the right brand image. But if Apple had all those things and imposed a commission structure in its stores, one can be fairly certain that sales would not be as spectacular and growth itself would suffer.
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Note:
Again, this is probably quite an under-estimate and the actual cost of service might range up to 10%.
At this year's WWDC Apple offered an update on Game Center accounts. The data we have so far is shown in the following graph.
Before being acquired, another network, OpenFeint, announced 180 million iOS accounts in October 2011. Another figure to consider is the 40 million subscribers to Xbox Live (out of 66 million Xbox users). This subscriber base is paying for a service (about $1 billion per year) so it's not the same as the free Game Center model.
Rather than being a revenue source, Game Center is designed to engage users and to capture usage information. It also lets us gauge gaming "consumption" on iOS devices. That itself allows us to contemplate it as a gaming platform vis-à-vis alternate platforms.
To consider the figure as a proxy of penetration and engagement, the graphic below shows cumulative sales of gaming devices.[1]
Here are some observations:
There is a pattern of turnover of market participants
Each console "generation" had a clear market leader
The best-selling gaming device was the Nintendo DS closely followed by the PlayStation 2 [2]
Considering the 130 million Game Center accounts, iOS is already the third largest gaming platform
Furthermore, considering the OpenFeint iOS figure of 180 million accounts announced in 2011, iOS has already surpassed the cumulative sales figures for the Nintendo DS
No gaming device has ever reached the 200 million mark
At the current growth rate the number of Game Center accounts will surpass 200 million before the year end
Apple cites the number of games, downloads and payments to developers as evidence of ecosystem health and growth. The figure of Game Center accounts is yet another indicator. It shows growth in and of itself, but it also has the side effect of offering comparative measurement of performance. That measurement compares favorably with other game platforms.
The economics are different but they always are when a disruption takes root.
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Notes:
Based on reported cumulative sales (Wikipedia), excluding gaming devices with less than 10 million cumulative sales (excludes for example PlayStation Vita), excludes also “home computers” due to missing reported figures
