Adriano Farano

How many iPad have been sold in the US so far?

Apple does not release the data about how its iPad sales are broken down per country.

But today I wanted to know how many Apple iPads are out there in the United States.

So I crossed three sets of data:

• official Apple financial reports data until 2011 Q4, nicely summarized by MacWorld, that include both 2010 and 2011 iPad sales
• Apple’s press release of January 24, 2012 where the Cupertino firm says it has sold 15.43 million iPads
• a research study of the Pew Internet and America project on e-books and tablets in the U.S. that was released on January  23, 2012

The result is this spreadsheet where I found that there are 33 million iPad in the U.S. Okay, it’s a pure speculation but I wouldn’t be surprised if those numbers were not that far from the reality.

This would mean that out of the 55 million iPad units that Apple shipped around the world according to the official figures, 60% were sold in the U.S. which looks like a lot but, given the fact that the US is Apple’s primary market, I guess these might be pretty accurate figures.

If you know any way to make this hypothesis more solid, feel free to comment here.

Update 1. Chris Foresman who covers Apple at Ars Technica told me on Twitter:

Hard to say how true that is… Apple says 58% of its revenue comes from international sales. (see tweet) Given that iPads and iPhones make up the majority of that revenue, it seems more likely that only 40% were sold in the US. (see tweet)

Update 2. Google just released a global survey where it says only 11% of Americans actually own a tablet. Since this would mean Americans are not that early adopters coming to tablets, I am quite skeptical about that figure. But I updated the spreadsheet anyway. That would give us an estimate of only 19 million iPad sold in the U.S. so far, meaning that a mere 38% of total iPad sales were actually done in this country. This would roughly be in line with the fact that, according to Chris Foresman, 58% of Apple revenue comes from international sales.

The author of this article is Adriano Farano, an entrepreneur in residence at StartX, Stanford student startup accelerator. Adriano is a Knight Fellow ‘11 at Stanford and a web entrepreneur working on his third company in the mobile publishing space. Learn more about Adriano by reading his bio, tweets or LinkedIn account.