Apple on course for quarterly iPod sales surge

Apple will sell between 11 and 12 million iPods this quarter, according to NPD’s analysis of sales figures for January.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said that the figure is ‘based on various assumptions’, explaining that it had been calculated by comparing January’s data with its proportion of sales in previous years.

‘When the second month of data is released, our analysis will likely lead to a slightly different iPod unit figure,’ he wrote in a note to investors

Munster noted that the estimate is higher than both Wall Street’s 10.9 million and his own 10.3 million. It is also significantly higher than the 8.5 million iPods that were sold in the same quarter last year, though the increase is not as high as the 50 per cent year-on-year surge in the last three months of 2006, when Apple sold 21 million music players.

These figures suggest that contrary to some predictions, the imminent release of the iPhone is not having a discernible effect on iPod sales. The picture is not entirely clear, however, since there is no breakdown of sales for individual iPod models. It is conceivable that the iPhone could be affecting sales of the high-end video iPod, with the shortfall made-up by buoyant shuffle shipments, as Prudential Equity analyst Jesse Tortora ventured recently.

Apple chief operating officer Tim Cook said earlier this week that ‘it’s still too early to tell’ whether iPhone is having an effect, adding that the variety of models, capacities and prices continues to ensure a large market for the music players. Amazon’s US sales chart certainly shows no sign of an ‘iPhone-effect’, with the black 30GB and 80GB video iPods in the top two places.

iTunes sales are also expected to ‘uptick’ in the current quarter, according to Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey, who told investors that in the previous three months Apple doubled sales of gift vouchers for the music and video downloads store.