[ad_1]
The mismatch between supply and demand for the Apple Watch — one that has already pushed delivery dates all the way to June — has many Apple watchers scratching their heads.
Carl Howe, a long-time student of the company — mostly for the Yankee Group, now for 451 Research — thinks he knows what’s going on.
I believe Apple did this for an important reason,” he writes in his executive summary. “Apple is offering 38 different models of Apple Watch and it has no order history to go on. Instead of guessing at the right mix of models to manufacture, I believe that while Apple has manufactured a large number of Apple Watch electronics modules, it will perform the final assembly of actual products—the unique combinations of module, case, and band—to order.”
That’s the short version. The full version is 3,000 words long and includes a thought experiment in which the reader is asked to imaging producing one million Origami lobsters in a month — a challenge that pales next to the one Apple faced.
Apple is not the only company that manufactures devices by the millions. But only Apple disappoints customers if it can’t meet that demand in a matter of days.
Apple’s solution, Howe says, was to build a small number of watches of each type for store and demo use and then do build-to-order final assembly of the actual cases and bands ordered. That’s why Apple started pre-orders a fortnight before the April 24 ship date and why the ship dates are two weeks long (e.g. April 24 to May 8).
Using the same public information the other analysts are using, Howe estimates that Apple may have taken as many as 10 million pre-orders for an initial run of 3.1 Watches: 1.8 million aluminum, 1.3 million steel, and 40,000 gold.
Howe’s numbers are just guesses; the thesis is sound. Highly recommended.
LINK: Apple Watch: An Overnight Multi-Billion Dollar Business.
Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple
AAPL
coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.
[ad_2]
Leave a Reply