Apple announced during its first quarter earnings conference call the number of iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices through the December quarter hit the 160 million mark. Peter Oppenheimer, the company’s CFO, revealed the figure on Tuesday during his conference call remarks.
The quarter’s iPhone sales helped boost the number of iOS devices in the wild with some 16.2 million units sold. In comparison, the same quarter last year saw 8.7 million iPhones sold.
“This represents 86 percent year-over-year growth compared to IDC’s latest published estimate of 70 percent growth in the global smartphone market overall in the December quarter,” Mr. Oppenheimer said.
As of the end of the quarter, Apple had iPhone distribution deals with 185 carriers in 9 countries.
iOS sales top 160 million
“We continue to experience very strong year-over-year growth in all of our segments, with sales in the Asia-Pacific region and Japan both more than doubling year-over-year,” he added. “Enterprise customers continue to embrace iPhone, with 88 of the Fortune 100 companies and also 60 percent of the Financial Times Europe 100 companies now testing or deploying iPhone.”
iOS device sales are expected to remain strong, especially with the pending February launch of the iPhone 4 on Verizon’s network in the U.S.
iPad sales continue to add to the total number of iOS devices in customer’s hands. “We sold 7.3 million iPads, a sequential increase of over three million, with distribution in 46 countries by the end of December quarter,” Mr. Oppenheimer said.
Interest in iOS devices, and especially the iPad, is on the rise in the corporate world. So far, over 80 percent of the Fortune 100 companies are have either already begun deploying iPads in the work place, or are in the process of ramping up their iPad support.
Mr. Oppenheimer commented “Employee demand for iPad in the corporate environment remains strong and the response to the product continues to be significant.”
JPMorgan Chase, Cardinal Health, Wells Fargo, Archer Daniels Midland, Sears Holding and DuPont are among the companies that have umped on the iPad band wagon and are adding to the total number of iOS devices in the market.
Those numbers are good news for iOS app developers since their potential customer base is growing as more iPhones and iPads leave store shelves. Apple says more than nine billion apps have been downloaded from its App Store, and the company is currently counting down to the 10 billionth download.
The revelation that over 160 million iOS devices have been sold sends a strong signal to Web site developers and multimedia content providers since a significant number of their potential viewers are running devices that support the H.264 video codec instead of Adobe’s Flash or Google’s WebM formats.
Apple reported first quarter revenue at US$26.74 billion, up 71 percent year over year, with earnings up some 78 precent annually at $6 billion. The company sold 4.13 million Macs, 16.24 million iPhones, and 7.33 million iPads.
Apple is currently trading after hours at $347.70, up 5.05 (1.48%). The company’s stock closed at $340.65, down 7.83 for the day.