Click to Skip Ad
Closing in...

Apple may shock us all with huge Q2 iPhone sales

Published Mar 19th, 2014 2:52PM EDT

If you buy through a BGR link, we may earn an affiliate commission, helping support our expert product labs.

Apple sold more iPhones during the holiday quarter than it has ever sold before. At 51 million units, Apple’s record iPhone sales helped push the company’s holiday-quarter profit to a whopping $13.1 billion. The March quarter that follows always sees a notable slowdown after the holiday shopping rush, of course, but one of the most respected Apple analysts out there believes Apple is going to surprise us next month and report fiscal second-quarter iPhone sales that top expectations by a huge margin.

In a research note delivered to clients on Wednesday morning, Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty said Apple will likely sell 42 million iPhones during its fiscal second quarter. That figure would represent somewhat modest but surprising growth over the same quarter last year, when Apple sold 37.4 million iPhones.

Wall Street expects iPhone sales to be flat in the March quarter, coming in at 38 million units.

Huberty’s prediction uses Morgan Stanley’s proprietary “Alphawise Smartphone Tracker” to monitor Web chatter and predict iPhone sales based on conversations and search trends. While it sounds dubious, Business Insider notes that Alphawise nailed iPhone sales last quarter with an estimate of 50.5 million units, which was just 500,000 off from the 51 million iPhones Apple actually sold between October and December last year.

Zach Epstein
Zach Epstein Executive Editor

Zach Epstein has been the Executive Editor at BGR for more than 10 years. He manages BGR’s editorial team and ensures that best practices are adhered to. He also oversees the Ecommerce team and directs the daily flow of all content. Zach first joined BGR in 2007 as a Staff Writer covering business, technology, and entertainment.

His work has been quoted by countless top news organizations, and he was recently named one of the world's top 10 “power mobile influencers” by Forbes. Prior to BGR, Zach worked as an executive in marketing and business development with two private telcos.