Back in February of this year, Eric Schmidt used his keynote at Mobile World Congress to disclose an interesting tidbit: between Google and their hardware partners, they were then shipping a collective total of around 60,000 units per day. Not too bad, right?
Its gotten even better.
In a shareholders meeting yesterday, Eric took the time to update the number: three months later, they’ve climbed from 60,000 per day to 65,000 per day. By our math, that’s around 8% growth. If they keep steady at this rate, they should be pushing between 5.5 and 6 million Android handsets shipped per quarter.
As with the last time, unfortunately, it’s unclear what Schmidt’s definition of “shipped” is. “Shipped” and “sold” are generally two entirely different things, with “shipped” just implying that they had been built and sent out to distribution partners, whether or not it ends up getting sold to an end consumer. However, distributors don’t generally continue buying things if they’re not selling — and seeing as they’re buying more of these things than they were before, we can assume that most of these units are getting snatched up.
For good ol’ comparisons sake: In their last reported quarter, Apple sold 8.75 million iPhones. That’s roughly 2.9 million per month, or 96,000 per day.