Sales of the Apple Watch have fallen by over 90% with staff at two major Apple stores in Australia telling Smarthouse that they get a lot of “lookers but few buyers”.
Apple is expected to hide the true sales of their pricy new watch which starts at $499 among ‘others’ such as cables, Apple TV etc wqhen they report their next financial results.
The collapse in sales has seen purchases fall in the USA where Apple sales are normally the strongest, fall from 20,000 watches a day at the start of the Apple spin campaign to as low 4,000.
An Apple employee at the Companies Chadstone store in Victoria said “We get a lot of people looking but not a lot buy, those that do are the Apple product fanatics”.
Apple staff said that the most common question is “What can it do with the watch that my phone cannot do”.
On certain days, in the USA the company has been selling just 5,000 watches, with sales dipping to as low as 4,000 units per day in late June.
Apple will not reveal sales numbers for their new Smart Watch range in Australia instead the Company prefers to run a controlled propaganda campaign.
The Company has failed to run any press briefings in Australia for the past 10 years.
Slice Intelligence says around two-thirds of the watches sold so far have been the ‘Sport’ version, which is the cheaper option, with a price tag of $499 in Australia.
Only 2,000 of the luxury gold ‘Edition’ model, priced at $10,000 and $14,000 in Australia, have been sold in the US, according to figures seen by MarketWatch.
Slice’s figures are unofficial and based on electronic receipts sent to email addresses following a purchase.
Pacific Crest Securities analyst Andy Hargreaves last week predicted Apple would sell 236 million iPhones this year and 218 million next year. This was before the new sales estimations were released.
Apple sold 10 million iPhone 6 and 6 Plus handsets the first weekend they went on sale and this rose to 74.5 million iPhones by the end of last year.
Future sales figures are likely to include what has been dubbed Apple’s iPhone 6s.
As with previous years, Apple is expected to launch a new handset in September and it is likely to be a minor update on the current iPhone 6 and 6 Plus range.
Earlier this week, leaked images of the 6s and 6s Plus appeared on line and despite looking almost identical, hinted at significant improvements inside including the introduction of Force Touch, currently in the Watch.
According to MacRumors, it will be grouping the device under its ‘Other Products’ category – which combines sales of Apple Watch, iPod, Apple TV, Beats Electronics and accessories – in its quarterly fiscal reports.
This week an analyst who previously predicted Apple would sell 24 million devices during 2016 has significantly reduced this figure – to 21 million – following the lukewarm reaction to the wearable.
Pacific Crest Securities analyst Andy Hargreaves made the predictions in a research note to clients.
He said: ‘Anecdotal evidence suggests Apple Watch demand is slowing quickly’ and predicted sales for 2015 will reach 10.5 million – 500,000 less than his initial estimates.
Meanwhile, mixed reviews of the device combined with interest from the general public, measured by how many people are searching for the Watch online, suggest sales next year will also slow – to the difference of 3 million.
The predictions follow similar cuts by UBS in which analysts dropped sales forecasts by 23 per cent, and said the Watch is 20 per cent less popular than the original iPhone when it launched in 2007.
Slow sales could be blamed on the fact the Watch was only available to buy online, there were delays in shipping times and in-store sales are only just taking off.
This is in stark contrast to the soaring popularity of the iPhone. Google Trends data reveals people are searching for the Watch as often as they are for an iPod.
