Conclusion. iPhone X supply improved materially over the past week both in-store and online. We now believe iPhone X will be near global supply demand equilibrium by the end of December or early January. Previously, we had anticipated iPhone X would reach global supply demand equilibrium by mid- to late-January. This means the Mar-18 outlook will have only a fractional bump up from December iPhone X demand getting pushed in the Mar-18 quarter. We believe the bigger story is that the Street is under estimating the positive ASP impact from the iPhone X over the next few quarters, which should play out as a positive to the Apple story. Our FY18 overall iPhone ASP is $740 vs. the Street at $705.
Online lead times continue to improve. We noted an improvement in global iPhone X lead times (8 countries), exiting the week (Dec 10th) at 4 days, down from 8 days at the beginning of the week. For the week (Dec 4th-Dec 10th) we measured a decline to an average of 7 days, compared to an average of 10.1 days in the previous week (Nov 27th-Dec 3rd).
Apple Store availability jumps. We continued our daily monitoring of iPhone X availability, capturing 2224 daily in-store data points for 139 of the 271 U.S. Apple retail stores. Availability at U.S. Apple Stores increased to an average of 25% (Dec 4th-Dec 8th) compared to 7% in the previous week (27th-Dec 3rd). We saw a dramatic ramp during the week, starting at 6% availability and ending at 48%. It’s worth noting that on Friday, AT&T and Verizon showed 72% availability, and Sprint and T-Mobile showed 26% availability. Adjusting for market share by carrier (AT&T and Verizon have about 67% of the U.S. share), the effective in-store availability on Friday was 57%.
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