Palm last year estimated that the company would sell 10 million WebOS phones in 2010, or approximately 850,000 units per month in average. Google said a couple of months ago that 1,800,000 Android phones are now sold per month. In other words, that would require Palm to sell one WebOS phone for every second Android phone sold around the world. Given there's a strong alliance behind the Android success, it would have been quite an achievement if Palm had actually been able to sell 10 million WebOS phones in 2010.
According to Gartner's "Sales to End Users" report for 2009, Palm sold 185,000 WebOS phones per month between June and December 2009. We assume Palm had very slow months in December 2009 and January 2010 though, perhaps as low as 75,000 units sold per month.
Earlier this week, Palm released the sales numbers for December 2009 to February 2010. The company sold 408,000 WebOS units in this period, including the first month of sales on Verizon Wireless. If we say Sprint accounted for 175,000 units and European carriers accounted for 50,000 units in this period, that would mean Verizon Wireless sold 183,000 units in its first month of offering WebOS phones.
If Sprint sells 60,000 units per month in 2010, that adds up to 720,000 in total. If European carriers sells 16,500 units per month in 2010, that adds up to 198,000 in total. If Verizon Wireless sells 250,000 units per month in average in 2010, that adds up to 3,000,000 in total. All in all, Palm would then end up selling 3,918,000 units in 2010. If Palm launches WebOS devices on AT&T later this year, and AT&T sells approximately 1 million units in 2010, it would end up on 5 million WebOS units sold in 2010.
With the currently available Android sales numbers of 1,800,000 units sold per month, it would mean that Palm could actually end up selling one WebOS phone for every fourth Android phone sold. We think that would still be quite an achievement in today's market.
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