If you’ll think back to Palm’s last quarterly conference call, they revealed that around 810,000 Pre phones had been sold. Now today despite the pleasant surprise in sales numbers that beat most estimations, one of those unruly analysts has reared his head and claimed that Palm is indeed not doing as well as we all thought. David Eller of Town Hall Research (whom we have heard from before) said in a recent note that Palm’s sales figures were inflated by reporting the number of units sold by Sprint plus those that Sprint shipped to third party resellers (e.g. Best Buy) instead of the actual number of activated units. Eller went on to say that “channel inventory is currently about 11 weeks, which we believe will pressure reorder rates and make it more difficult to sell high [average selling price] products going forward.”
Palm would have nothing of it, and in a response to John Paczkowski of Digital Daily said, “The sell-through data we post reflects carriers’ sales to their customers. For example, Sprint customers include consumers who buy in a Sprint store, and Sprint retail partners such as Best Buy and RadioShack. We rely on our wireless carriers to provide us with sell-through data, and we note this fact in our 10Q.”
[via: Gizmodo]
