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Apple Makes $831 On Each AT&T iPhone
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Oct 28, 2007 02:46 PM
from the minting-it dept.
from the minting-it dept.
Ponca City, We Love You writes "The NYTimes reports that Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, has studied Apple's financial statements and come to the conclusion that AT&T is paying Apple $18 a month, on average, for each iPhone sold by Apple and activated on AT&T's network — up to $432 over a two-year contract. This shows how much incentive Apple has to maintain its exclusive deal with AT&T rather than to sell unlocked phones or cut deals with multiple carriers. Last week Apple disclosed that 250,000 iPhones had been purchased but not registered with ATT that Apple thinks are being unlocked so Apple has now taken action to curb unauthorized resellers by limiting sales of the iPhone to two per customer and requiring that purchases must now be made with a credit or debit card — cash will not be accepted." The latter article links to a US Treasury page explaining the incorrectness of the widely-held belief that cash cannot be refused for any transaction.
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They make money. So what. (Score:4, Interesting)
I just find it amusing that some people get upset that a hardware manufacturer makes money or a lot of it. Maybe they are so accustomed to the subsidized Xbox model where MS supposedly loses money on each sale only to try to salvage it later (MS couldn't afford it if Xbox was their business like Windows/Office is anyway). It is no way to say that Apple has to be doing things that way and there is a lot of competition out there for these devices if you don't like their way of business.
I still think Apple is being rather silly about the cash issue. Many people I know don't have credit cards because that's how they control their spending. This isn't to say that they don't have money though.... their probably more affluent than average and can afford these gadgets.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Making money doesn't automatically make the business behind the money acceptable to the consumer, regardless whether the consumer is happy in their purchase or not. If the consumer knew they were being violently ripped-off by their latest purchase, no matter how great it was, they'd be upset.
Re:They make money. So what. (Score:5, Interesting)
- A better product value (this includes technical specs, service quality, license agreement, and of course price) than any other competitor can offer;
- A NET gain for the customer for purchasing the product (in other words, no matter how objectively "crappy" the product is, the customer will be more satisfied buying the product than not buying it.
Out of the whole range of options which satisfies the above two points, a business will always choose one that is best for the BUSINESS, not the customer.
E.g. If more people cared about carrier lock-in and less about the flashy buttonless display, then they wouldn't buy iPhone in particular, would they? Can't say I'm terribly thrilled by Apple's tactics, but I find it perfectly fair that in a free market society where competition to Apple DOES exist, Apple has the full right to say "either take our products how they are and with all strings attached, or take a hike".
If you don't like this business model, then you do not support free market in principle (not preaching whether that is good or bad, just stating the fact).
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Your right, I don't expect a business to act in any way that does not maximize their own profit. Nevertheless, we need to pass laws and regulations to ensure that the actions of profit maximizing corporations do not interfere with the collective well-being of society.
Property laws, Anti-trust legislation, and contract enforcement are all examples of such laws. Without such measures, free markets would barely function, let alone be optima
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A NET gain for the customer for purchasing the product (in other words, no matter how objectively "crappy" the product is, the customer will be more satisfied buying the product than not buying it.
Sorry to nitpick, but if Apple only netted a single cent after all costs, it still would not sell the product. Typically businesses will analyze the Return On Investment [wikipedia.org] (ROI) within a given period. So, net gain has to be greater than say, investing the money elsewhere or diverting funds to a more lucrative project. Considering that they may get upwards of 40-50% ROI because of the heavy markup and deal with AT&T, this is *definitely* the better deal.
Getting around the cash thing.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Getting around the cash thing.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Freeing the Hardware (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Freeing the Hardware (Score:5, Interesting)
The legislation says that "linked sale" (vente lie'e) is forbidden: if you offer some good for sale, you are not allowed to force the buyer to buy a service together with this good.
There has been a debate in the press about whether Apple would renounce selling iPhones in France or find a workaround.
The trick Orange will use is to propose the iPhone at a prohibitive price (1000 euros?) and offer a massive discount for any plan purchased with it. But consumer watch organizations are quite powerful here, and they could sue if they show the price is too high and the scheme is actually a disguised "vente lie'e". The consumer watch organization are allowed to use surveys and statistical analyses to show this, so Orange and Apple will have to play tight at this game.
BTW. I'm surprised so many of you in the US have plans around $60/month. I pay 14 euros/month for basic service, but it's plenty enough airtime.
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Someone has to say it ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Hard to believe. (Score:3, Interesting)
"cash will not be accepted" (Score:3, Interesting)
useful information (Score:5, Insightful)
Nevertheless, where do you think this money is coming from? Do you think that AT&T is giving that to Apple because they are such good buddies?
No, you are paying for it one way or another (e.g., by paying a premium for their sluggish EDGE service).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Geez... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is getting ridiculous (Score:4, Interesting)
Most phone makers get a kickback from the carrier because the consumer never paid the manufacturer directly, but this is not the case with Apple.
AT&T Is Getting Their Money's Worth (Score:4, Insightful)
The complaints about the iPhone never seem to come from iPhone users. The highest customer satisfaction in phones is iPhone at 82%, the next best is Blackberry at 51%, then ALL THE REST are below 50%. Everybody is paying a similar monthly carrier fee for their phone, but not everybody is getting the same value from it. So complaints about how much money Apple/AT&T are making while offering a single phone that has both the highest customer satisfaction and the most features really seem disingenuous to me. Complain about how much companies are making for selling phones that garner http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=iphone+customer+satisfaction&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Cash vs Credit (Score:3, Funny)
Darn them (Score:4, Funny)
Call me an asshole / mod me down as flamebait but (Score:3, Funny)
Fuck Apple
This is more horrendous bullshit, from a hardware manufacturer trying to hold it's consumers / customers hostage...to the world's shittiest telco.
There is NO device that has functionality SO GREAT...that would make me jump through hoops such as this nonsense.
When are people going to wake up?
So buy prepaid credit cards... (Score:4, Informative)
If technology is driving down the cost of hardware (circuit complexity increasing by 2x every 2 years -- classic Moore's Law according to Wikipedia). Meaning you can compress data at a lower cost, you can transmit more data at a lower cost. Then why should not communications costs be declining at that same rate? I could care less if I get video on demand. My voice comununications should be almost free. The challenge to AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc. is why our bills (adjusted for quantity of data delivered) should not be declining by at least 1/2 every 2 years.
Apple can sell a fancy phone, whose advanced features I do not have to use. Lower the costs of my minimal connectivity. That is all I (as someone 51 y.o) needs to have I mean *really* what the hell does an iPhone provide that an easily available terminal cannot provide. And if you do not have an easily available terminal -- where the hell are you living? (And as a brief aside I have had dinner with Steve Jobs -- though I respect him as an individual I wasn't that impressed.) I would cite Google as being much more likely to change the playing field than Apple at the current time. It could strongly be argued that Apple has sold out to AT&T. Fortunately the hackers will defeat their efforts to completely manipulate their technology -- which customers have purchased. My hardware. My right to program it for my purposes. Claim otherwise. You will lose.
Math. (Score:5, Informative)
$432 from 24 months @ $18/month
----
$831
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that math is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
apple doesn't get iphones from fairies. They pay money to build them.
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Re:that math is wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, you're right. That is, unless Apple is using Oompa Loompas to make them. Then, they might be free. The materials are all derived from recycling old Newtons and glued together with the tears of Apple fanatics upset about the $200 price drop.
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Re:that math is wrong (Score:5, Funny)
(Lights flash, teenager freezes mid-grasp.)
(A group of small, odd men enter from a previously unnoticed doorway under the iMac stand.)
Oompa Loompa doopity do
I've got an iPhone here for you.
Oompa Loompa doopity day
Sign here and here and take it away.
What do you get when you follow a craze?
Buying everything to the end of your days.
What do you do when you're nose-deep in debt?
You will pay all your wages, that's a certain bet.
I don't like the look of it.
Oompa Loompa doopity dah
If you are cautious you will go far.
You can live in happiness too
Without credit like the Oompa Loompas doopity do!
(Irritating teenager is sucked down a pipe, parents watch in horror and are led away by an Oompa Loompa)
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Re:that math is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
It's better to report the total without them taking wild-ass blind guesses as to how much of that is profit (like iSuppli's crazily inadequate "what it costs" figures). Even if those numbers are right (and sometimes they just pull costs out of their ass because it's "close enough" to something they've seen before), that still only gets you to gross profit. And at the end of the day, gross profit is nowhere even close to the much smaller net profit.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That means profit alone. If you aren't aware of this, that's fine. After all, many people on the internet are not in English speaking countries, so perhaps you just aren't very familiar with the language we are using.
No big deal, but apple makes a heck of a lot less than 831 per phone. Still a heck of a lot.
Re:that math is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Then perhaps the obvious flamebait headline should have been crafted to reflect that simple fact. But in the age of one-liner evangelism, Apple Makes $831 Revenue (Though Not Really Profit, Mind You) On Each AT&T Phone Although That's Pretty Much Irrelevant To Everything, We're Just In It For the AdSense Revenue just doesn't work.
I'm having trouble trying to understand the mindset of people who think $831 or $8,311 represents "greed". If the market will bear it, that's the correct price. Otherwise Apple would have sold 1,000 iPhones instead of 100,000 or however many they've shipped so far.
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Re:that math is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:that math is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't understand... if something is marked up 75%, there most likely isn't business elsewhere. Is someone else selling iPhones besides Apple? Are they cheaper? Get the picture? If I told you Oil was being sold at a 100% markup, are you going to trade in the car for a bicycle as a show of "taking your business elsewhere?" No. You are either going to buy this "widget" for "this price" or you aren't. Supply and demand set the price, not it's known markup. If you are going to use markup in your purchasing decisions, know that it will have zero effect on everyone elses purchasing tends, and therefore will do nothing more than satisfy your strange needs to not give too much profit, even if demand supports it.
Good luck.
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Re:that math is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Good luck.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect there isn't a whole lot of judges that would let the "They wouldn't do what we wanted them to do after they paid for the item, so we deactivated it" argument hold water.
Re:that math is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong. You know why? Because this is not bread, or baby formula or bottled water or heating oil. It's a fucking gadget. People obviously didn't have a problem with the price when they whipped out their credit cards by the hundreds of thousands and lapped these things up like candy because they wanted to be "hip". It's a cell phone. What's the difference if you suddenly figure out that Apple has a 75% markup on the thing? Or 400%? You obviously don't care, since you already agreed the price was fair by purchasing one.
If Steve Jobs' core talent consisted on taking a crap and putting it in an off-white plastic case with shiny lights and selling it for $2,500 a pop, who are you to complain? On the contrary, more power to him and the chumps who get bilked because they want to be fashionable.
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Re:that math is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
When they don't have data on a particular component, they use something they deem to be relatively similar. They extrapolate an approximate price based on what they feel is an appropriate price at a given (assumed) volume level. They never seem to account for time or place of purchase, either, which can be significant factors in volatile markets. For example, they used a run of the mill touchscreen price for the iPhone, without multitouch and without the daylight-readable backlighting.
Each step of the game is an approximation adding further error to the calculation, and by the end, they almost invariably end up at a "cost" figure that is below reality, sometimes significantly. I have some experience in various litigation involving some of the products they've assessed, and based on what we get in discovery, iSuppli's numbers are, in comparison, highly conservative and geared toward getting the highest possible gross profit rather than providing the most accurate figure. They generate the biggest stir when people think that actual manufacture costs peanuts, so it makes sense from their perspective, but it does a disservice to everyone.
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Re:that math is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Without being able to get within 20% in some cases of the actual materials cost, it doesn't inform any conclusion about the product. The general gross margin range they report is 25-50%--practically that entire variation is within their margin of error in reporting the figures in the first place. Thus, the assessments, apart from being nerd porn, are perfectly vacuous.
I think most people can figure out that almost nothing is sold without a gross margin of at least 20%, and that 50% isn't terribly uncommon either. Unless iSuppli shows up with a 75% margin one day, there's nothing useful about it.
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Re:that math is wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Getting to within 10% of the cost of goods sounds fantastic to me. Within 20-25% still sounds not bad. It's a lot better than a total guess, which seems to be what you're suggesting. (gross margins of between 20 and 50 %).
Incidentally, on the whole matter of Apple making money:
I'm not a big fan of the iPhone -- it's simply not the product for me. Part of that's price, much of that's the lockin -- on apps and to a carrier if you want stable seamless firmware upgrades.
But I'm delighted to see it succeed and delighted to see Apple making lots of money off it. I doubt Apple's going to take 70-90% of the smartphone market, and if they do, it'll be because they deserve to. People like RIM and Nokia will have manifestly failed to execute.
Apple making lots of money off of smartphones means, ultimately, cheaper and better smartphones for everyone.
I have a fantastic Samsung media player. It plays Ogg Vorbis. Terrific features. Inexpensive, too. And an absolutely horrible interface. The iPod's wiping out players with horrible interfaces. Great. That's good for us all. The latest Samsungs are immeasurably better.
Smartphones will get better and cheaper because of the iPhone. That's good for everyone.
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Re:that math is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
An error of 20% on a parts bill will move you from one end of the gross margin scale to the other. In other words, the error of the estimated cost rarely does any better than the standard margins on products. Then there is absolutely no guidance whatsoever on net profit figures, which are what really matter. The company itself can be assessed, but it's pure folly to try to do it for individual products.
Let's take a product. Retail price $100, iSuppli guess: $58 for parts. That's 42% gross profit, and we will use your conservative and overly generous 10% range for accuracy. The possible gross margins range from 47% to 36%. What does this mean? That they fall in the normal range of 20 to 50%. What did we learn? Nothing. We already knew it was almost certainly going to be in that range, and regardless of where it falls, it's unremarkable because it's the normal range. The only place it would be noteworthy would be if iSuppli found figures grossly outside that range (e.g. 75% or 5%), and that basically never happens.
What do you gain by knowing that the product is within a normal range of markup? The "smaller iSuppli margin" product could easily be the bigger-margin cash cow, and an attempt to minimize the pocket-lining of corporations can't be undertaken with the information iSuppli supplies, if you'll pardon the pun.
When your margin of error covers the most of the basic spread of possibilities, you're not providing a service. Trying to peg it down to some quasi-accurate Ouija-board figure without any real knowledge gets us nowhere useful. iSuppli rarely, if ever, has provided anything better than a 20% range on a 20% range, which means it has never demonstrated or even rationally suggested that any given product is a better "value" than any other. It relies on faulty analysis for people to make that claim and gives them a quasi-factual, half-true basis to do so. This can only cause harm.
The entire system is highly variable from company to company, and even among products from a single company. Without details, it is impossible to get any accuracy beyond a massive range. Gross profits are usually 20 to 50 percent. Net profits for self-sustaining (i.e. not loss-leaders) products are usually 5 to 20 percent. Anyone offering you any level of accuracy beyond that without specific documentation is lying.
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Re:that math is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the point that I took away from it, which is pretty insightful. It's not about how much they are profiting, it's about why they are exclusive with AT&T. I'd agree that its foolish for a variety of reasons for people to complain about how much Apple profits from t
Exactly! also this exaplins a lot. (Score:4, Insightful)
Now another way of saying this is I am paying 431 dollars less than the true sales price of the iphone. Or another way of saying it is, AT&T is giving me an $18 a month discount for using an Iphone on their network. All upside to me. Of course that mean I should be upset about the unlockers who are preventing them from giving me an even larger discount.
This seems to fit some other piece of the puzzle. For example, Why to UK iphones cost so much more? Presumably because of a lower subsidy. And why is apple booking the iphone revenue as deferred subscription income? Because they are probably not making any money on the sales, but on the 18$ per month.
Finally, this also helps axplain the anomolous $200 price drop. My original guess, which this reinforces, was that apple took a huge gamble on the technology. Craploads could have gone wrong. The screens might have scratched to easily, the batteries might have died prematurely, the OS might have blue screened. . So many untested things you can't really adequately Q/A before the roll out. Plus it might not have been popular. There were a few look-alikes in the pipeline, what if one had rolled out earlier?
So they had a huge risk margin built into the price. Once the risk dissipated they could remove that. But at the time this hypothesis seemed a little off. Sure a risk margin is there in any product but how could they overestimate by 50% of the propert phone price? that seems way too high. But now realize the true sales price of the phone was 1031$ and they lowered it by 20% to 831. Now it does not seem quite so absurd.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course you can. "Legal tender" simply means that it is a legally acceptable form of payment, not that you must accept it.
I can demand live chickens and jelly beans as payment if I feel like it, and you waving cash in my face while threatening to call the police can't make any difference.
Re:Too bad apples lawyers do not understand Law. (Score:5, Informative)
Cash must be accepted as payment for debts. IOW if you owe someone money and offer cash in payment, they can't legally refuse to accept it. If you do not owe them money, though, then no debt exists and that rule doesn't apply. A merchant's entirely free to refuse any method of payment for a transaction where no debt exists yet.
For the iPhone, this means that if you walk up to the counter wanting to buy, they're allowed to refuse to sell for cash. Once you've bought the phone and used the service and now owe them money for that service, however, they're not free to refuse a cash payment.
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Re:Too bad apples lawyers do not understand Law. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
if i am selling oranges at the side of the road, i can demand only to be paid in venison. if you owe me $10,000 i CANNOT demand you pay back in gold or euros or anything else. i can ask to be paid in that manner but if you choose to pay back the debt in greenbacks and i refuse, the debt is canceled.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, because only Apple and Microsoft make mobile phones.
TWW
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You'd better point me at where the iPods are "locking" you into iTunes. According to all reports 90% of iPod content is not fro iTunes.
he's probably talking about iTunes, the software, as opposed to iTunes, the store.
And yes Apple started to implement a hash to the iPod database. This is probably in order to lock out 3rd party software in the future (it was easily hacked this time). They also started to disable video out signals unless you connect it to Apple TV.
So I think his point is very, very valid and since there is competition in the cell phone -, as well in the portable media player market it's not really that hard to pull off.
Re:Cingular/AT&T doesn't get my phone purchase (Score:4, Informative)
The card I received from cingular/att was equivalent to a VISA check/debit card, I spent the full amount without fees at the grocery store. Surely you buy things at some place that accepts VISA cards?
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Re:Cingular/AT&T doesn't get my phone purchase (Score:5, Interesting)
LOL. Yes, and they also don't take out zero-down mortgages, make car-buying decisions based on the monthly payment rather than the total cost, or rent extra-fancy furniture/tvs/etc when they could buy cheaper versions.
Average number of credit cards per U.S. household: 12.7 [harpers.org]
Just because you and your few closest buddies have some clue about financial planning, doesn't mean 99.9% of people do.
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