Palm Pre’s Mysterious Sales Trends
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Since January, the Palm Pre has sent Palm's stock on a rampage... but is it warranted?
Palm’s stock price has soared in the last 6 months. Early January’s price was around $3, which exploded to over $7 by the end of the month after the Pre was shown off at CES in Las Vegas. Today it’s lingering around $15. This is all occurring while Palm keeps the public relatively in the dark about Palm Pre’s unit sales trends. Barron’s reports the guerrilla data acquiring techniques of the wireless consulting firm iGR has yielded some data that might allow us to circumnavigate Palm’s unwillingness to divulge specific bits of data. You can read the whole article here, but I’ll break it down for you in really simple terms:
In an iGR (hired by JNK securities) report given this week, 50 Sprint Stores were visited.
- Zero of these stores were sold out of the Palm Pre
- 8% of stores sold out last week, 28% the week before that, and 38% in the first week of sale.
- None of the stores who were willing to discuss sales sold more than 30 units in the latest week.
- iGR also tracked App Catalog downloads of popular apps like Pandora and Accuweather and say trends have slowed down, but no specific data was given.
- JRPG estimates Palm has sold 84K units in the first launch week, and 200K-250K units by the end of the first month.
These estimates don’t appear to support any iPhone killing claims. Palm certainly did not decide to take the approach of reducing production to increase sell-out rates.
Palm Pre on Holiday in Europe
I don’t want to put a huge damper on Palm stock (I delude myself that I have any influence over such matters), so here’s some good news to counter balance. O2, a British mobile provider has officially announced that they will be carrying the Palm Pre exclusively and will have it by the holiday season. Jolly good then, another cup a’ tea gov’nah, let’s celebrate.