I'm Clearly Not Smart Enough to Understand Business

On Monday I wrote about how awesome Dredd 3D is and how I don't understand by what criteria it was being judged to have "bombed".  Yesterday I heard something equally baffling on the news about the iPhone 5.

I'm not going to talk about how I feel about Apple products, because its honestly irrelevant.  The product could be a toaster, as this is about sales projections and reporting, not the iPhone 5 as a product itself.

So the iPhone 5 sold 5 million units in 3 days.  That's insane.  That's a shit ton of phones.  More importantly, that was basically the entire stock that Apple had for the initial release.  So the iPhone 5 is "all but sold out".  Okay.  There are basically no more left.  Maybe 100k or something.

So then I hear--in the same breath--that the 5 million unit sales were below the projected sales for the initial offering and as a result Apple's stock price dropped a percent or so.  (here and here)

Wait, WTF?!

Look, you have a fixed number of the things to sell going into the release, and 5 million is a huge number.  Now stay with me here because this is important.  You can't expect to sell more of a thing than you have.  How much more?  Well the projections were between 8 to 10 million units.  Yes, they were projecting Apple would sell 3 to 5 million more units then they had on hand.  In three days.

Here's what I imagine happened in every sales projection meeting leading up to the sale:

"I think Apple will sell 10 million iPhone 5s in the initial offering."

"They only have 5 million of them."

*Coy smile while reclining in office chair* "I know."

*Stunned stare* "You're brilliant!!! I'm going to throw money at you because you are handsome and smart!!!!"

I've learned from this that sales projectionists (that's what I'm calling them now) basically don't know how to count, nor do their bosses.