According to sources, Apple has boosted its iPhone global shipment target for the first quarter of 2011 to between 20 million and 21 million units — up from 19 million previously. Industry sources also told the Taiwan-based DigiTimes on Monday that Apple intends to ship five to six million WCDMA iPhones to carriers in North America and the Asia-Pacific region during the first three months of next year.
The unconfirmed production boost would be substantially higher than the 15 million iPhone shipments that Wall Street analysts have predicted for the fourth quarter of this year — up from the 14.1 million units Apple shipped in the three months through September. But demand would increase dramatically if Apple terminates its U.S. exclusivity agreement with AT&T and launched a CDMA-compatible iPhone to satisfy pent-up demand for such a device from rival Verizon Wireless’ 90 million subscribers.
“We believe that Apple’s exclusive agreement with AT&T has limited demand for the device,” Piper Jaffray analysts Gene Munster, Michael Olson, and Andrew Murphy noted earlier this month.
Embracing the Multi-Carrier Model
The United States is the only remaining country of the 89 nations in which the iPhone is sold that involves an exclusive agreement, Munster, Olson and Murphy observed. “The company has exhibited a clear trend toward the multi-carrier model in recent months, and we believe [Apple] will complete the trend by adding Verizon in the U.S. in the first half of 2011,” they wrote.
Apple currently trails behind Nokia (36.6 percent) and Android (25.5 percent) in the smartphone market with a 16.7 percent share worldwide, according to Gartner. So launching the iPhone on Verizon’s network early next year would undoubtedly help Apple continue to grow even as Google’s Android platform becomes more widely available on a global basis.
Moreover, the iPhone’s move to Verizon’s network might even take…