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iDevice Users Generate A Great Deal Of Cash For Cupertino's Bottom Line

iDevice Users Generate A Great Deal Of Cash For Cupertino's Bottom Line

July 1, 2011
asymco's head honcho, Horace Dediu, has endeavored to run a short, basic analysis of how much, on an annual average, each Apple mobile user is worth to the Cupertino company. Using a series of calculations that take into account 180 million active users, 200 million individual unit sales, and a typical product lifetime of 3.5 years, Dediu posits that Jobs and company enjoy a yearly revenue of around $150 per customer. That's certainly not chump-change -- even for a giant corporate entity like Apple -- but Dediu takes things even further, plugging in a (not-too-distant) industry forecast for presumed increases in iOS clientele:
[I]f we extrapolate growth of iOS to 500 million users then we can assume they will generate $74 billion/yr in recurring revenues.
Add this baseline assessment to the similarly trending expansion of Apple's Mac user-base, and, soon, the company can reasonably expect to collect some $95 billion in yearly revenue on these two product lines alone. Keep in mind, those numbers do not include iTunes music or app sales, nor do they account for any first-party peripheral or Mac software sales. Wow! Maybe that whole "trillion dollar company" thing isn't so hard to believe, after all.

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