Stop the Noiz

Toshiba Passes Apple in Unit Sales, Not Profits

Frank Fox - 2010.01.15 - Tip Jar

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Short link: http://bit.ly/8l4qUQ

Poor, poor, Apple. It only had 31% growth year-over-year for last quarter and slipped to 5th place in the US market, as reported by IDC.

Compare that to Toshiba, which had a whopping 71% growth to pass Apple and take the #4 spot.

Apple was totally creamed by the growth of Windows PCs.

That's what the numbers say - until you dig into what the actual profit difference is for these two companies.

Toshiba is reported to have made some of these gains by selling low cost netbooks for around $350 each. There were undoubtedly some more expensive notebooks adding to the total. However, the bulk of the growth came from computers that sold for around $400. (This is not an exact number, since Toshiba hasn't released that information.)

Apple doesn't have any $350 netbooks to inflate its sales. Instead, Apple sold $1,000 MacBooks, $600 Mac minis, and $2,400 Mac Pros. I'm going to be real conservative and estimate the average Mac sold for only $1,000.

Let's look at how many units each company sold last quarter based on the numbers from IDC.

	4th Qtr '09	4th Qtr '08	Sales Increase
Toshiba	1,720,000	1,003,000	717,000
Apple	1,523,000	1,163,000	360,000

It looks like Toshiba sold twice the number of computers. Way to go, Toshiba.

But what were the profits for each company?

	Sales	Profits
Toshiba: $400, 20% margin	$286,800,000	$57,360,000
Apple: $,1000, 33% margin	$360,000,000	$118,800,000

Sorry Toshiba, but those crap netbooks you sold weren't worth a whole lot of profit. I guess Apple's strategy of selling the better computer at a higher price is paying off.

In addition to making more money without trying hard, Apple has a netbook killer, the iPhone/iTouch combo.

If we could just get IDC to include the iPhone and iTouch to Apple's unit sales numbers, we'd really see how Apple is doing against its peers. Units and profits would equal what the whole computer industry sells in netbooks. The growth would be off the charts.

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