US iPhone revenue is now over 8 times US RIM revenue

A painful observation, this.

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RIM reports US revenue, which was $700m in the May 2012 quarter, down from $2.1bn in May 2010, a 66% decline. 

Apple doesn’t split out iPhone revenue by region, but the US operators that sell iPhones report their quarterly unit sales. If you apply Apple’s overall ASP (around $650) for the iPhone to those numbers (a rough but reasonable assumption), you get about $1.8bn in the March 2012 quarter, and $5.9bn in the March 2012 quarter, a 3.3x increase. 

In other words, in the last two years: 

  • US iPhone revenue has tripled
  • US RIM revenue has fallen by two thirds
  • US iPhone revenue is now over 8 times US RIM revenue. 

Despite both starting from roughly the same point. 

(Caveats: this doesn’t include any iPhone revenue share from operators,nor other factors like Google payments for Apple’s use of Google Search on the iPhone. Equally, a third of RIM revenue is service fees rather than direct hardware sales).

Benedict Evans