Earlier today (Note from Angus: that was yesterday Paul!) I was having a chat with Brandon Flowers (aka Mizzle) about the sales figures for the X10. Both of us were interested in how well it was selling, but of course neither of us, or pretty much anyone else outside SE for that matter, has access to that information. Well one man that does is Eldar who posted a rather interesting tweet the other day. Eldar mentioned that NTT DoCoMo, the biggest network in Japan, had ordered 50,000 X10s for the launch, but that they had only managed to shift 9,000 of them so far. That doesn’t seem like very many to be blunt and it raises the question of how well the X10 is actually doing, not just in Japan, but across all the markets it has been launched in.
It’s a hard question to answer for the reason I gave above, simply put few people have access to that information. The best we can do for the time being is to rely on anecdotal evidence and conjecture, neither of which are particularly useful here. Sure plenty of the people I know personally have bought an X10 or have been talking about it, but how representative is that? Looking at Google Trends we see a huge spike in interest in the X10 recently, but again that isn’t useful in answering the question beyond saying that the handset is generating some interest. That really only leaves us with one option, analyse the Japanese results and try to apply them to the rest of the world. However, we again run into a problem because of the nature of the Japanese market. Anyone familiar with the Japanese mobile market will know that it isn’t called the Galapagos of the mobile world for nothing. It’s a law unto itself and what applies in Japan more often than not doesn’t apply in the rest of the world. Given that the Japanese market is dominated by handsets made specifically for the networks there, and which sport their own heavily customised OS, and which often sport features uncommon, or non-existent, in the rest of the world is it fair to try and apply these results to other markets? I think not.
Having said all that it is worth reflecting on these results a little. If DoCoMo ordered 50,000 units that tells us that they expect to be able to sell at the very least the majority of those units. If they had forecast that demand would be around the 10,000 mark I don’t think it is unreasonable to suggest that they would have placed an order more in the range of 15,000 to 20,000 units. It is also worth mentioning that we don’t know what time scale DoCoMo expects to sell those 50,000 units in. A week? A month? A year? We have to accept that 9,000 units is low, but we just don’t have enough information yet to properly assess the matter. I’m making a few enquiries myself so watch this space.
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