Apple and Google See Record Holiday Smartphone Sales

In each of the past few years the holiday season has given a huge boost to smartphone sales. However, this year’s Christmas day saw record activations for devices using Google’s (NASDAQ) Android platform and Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS. According to Flurry Analytics, on December 25th, 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated, compared to an average of 1.5 million daily activations between December 1st and December 20th. ^[1] This means that mobile devices such as Samsung’s Galaxy, Apple’s iPhone and iPad, and Amazon’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Kindle Fire likely benefited greatly from this frenzy.

The iPhone and iPad constitute about 53% and 12% of our $500 price estimate for Apple stock, respectively, which signifies the importance of these devices to Apple. Our price estimate is about 20% above the current market price.

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What does this mean for Apple?

The sudden increase in iOS activations means that the holidays could help Apple’s 4th quarter iPhone and iPad sales even more than expected. Apple is set to announce quarterly results in the second half of January, and it will be interesting to see how iPhone and iPad sales compare to expectations. We expect that Apple will be able to sell more than 26 million iPhones and nearly 14 million iPads in the quarter. However, with these record holiday sales the actual iPhone sales could be substantially higher.

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1. iOS & Android Shatter Records on Christmas Day, Flurry Analytics, December 27th, 2011 [↩]