According to a Taiwanese news source, HTC is expecting the G1 to create $747 Million Dollars of new revenue for the manufacturer. That number includes forecasts of $218 Million in 2008 and $529 Million in 2009. That’s from only the G1… HTC could (and likely will) release another Android handset before 2009 concludes.
Apparently, T-Mobile plans on ordering between 1.5 million and 2 million G1 handsets including 400k-500k which will be sold in 2008. But do the numbers add up?
If author Steven Huang is spot on with the numbers then selling 500,000 units THIS year at $179/G1 would result in less than $100 million in revenue. Does that mean T-Mobile is subsidizing over 50% of the device’s cost with a 2-year contract? Hmmm.
Later in the article, we find the following quote: “As a competing model against HTC`s Diamond, Apple`s iPhone and Samsung`s Omnia smartphones, G1, without either Google`s or HTC`s mark on it…”
Well we know THAT is inaccurate, which makes those numbers seem a little more flimsy. But it DOES raise a pretty set of questions. The 400k to 500k units has been the standard G1 forecast around the web… but how much revenue will it create? How much subsidizing is T-Mobile doing? What does T-Mobile forecast its revenue increase will be directly resulting from the G1?
The above is a fun excercise in speculation, but I’m not sure how accurate the information is. In addition, the revenue numbers were provided in Taiwanese currency, New Taiwan Dollar and translated to US Dollars using, ironically, Yahoo currency converter. If its any consolation, I found it by googling ;)
[Via CENS.com]