Windows Phone on track for a 7 million + sales in Q4 2012

Windows Phone on track for a 7 million + sales in Q4 2012

December 28, 2012 | By Surur

(Gartner quarterly WP sales vs Quarterly MAU of the built-in Facebook app added, Q4 2012 sales predicted)

It seems Windows Phones have continued to fly of the shelves, and in Nokia’s case as fast as they can make them.

Our proxy numbers, monthly active Facebook users, have continued to soar in the month of December, adding half a million MAU in December and more than 1 million in Q4 2012. This compares to 100,000 added in December last year and 250,000 for the whole Q4 2012. It seems sales have held true to Microsoft’s earlier estimate of being 4 times as fast as last year.

Translating that into actual devices sold, that would correlate to around 7.4 million handsets sold this quarter. up from 4.05 million sold in Q3 2012, which is a rather healthy boost.   On the other hand in that quarter only 550 thousand MAU of the built-in Facebook function was added, vs more than a million in this quarter, indicating that there are definitely more new phones in more hands.

Now we have seen some who doubt the correlation between added Facebook users and Quarterly sales according to Gartner (who claims to measure handsets sold to consumers rather than shipped devices), so we went to the trouble of working out the R-value of our data from Q2 2011 to Q3 2012, and the result is 0.92, which is pretty close to a straight 1:1 correlation.

We chose to use numbers from Q2 2011, as that was, according to Gartner, from then no significant numbers of Windows Mobile handsets were sold, which would of course have messed up the correlation.

See the data below:

	Quarterly Added MAU FB WP	Gartner Quarterly WP sales	Ratio
Q2-2011	209855	1723800	8.2
Q3-2011	189778	1707900	9.0
Q4-2011	248607	2759000	11.1
Q1 2012	457143	2712500	5.9
Q2 2012	571429	4087000	7.2
Q3 2012	549206	4058200	7.4
Q4 2012	1022222	7432300 (Predicted)	7.3

Note this does not necessarily mean Nokia will boast large sales on the 24th of January.  We know from other sources that some of the best selling handsets were Nokia Lumia 800 phones which Nokia must have shipped 3 quarters ago and Nokia Lumia 610s which shipped in Q3. However developers do not care about shipments but phones in the hands of potential customers, and from the data available it seems that market just grew by close to 30% this quarter.