iPhone 3G S Launch Breaks AT&T Sales Records

According to an internal memo sent to company employees at AT&T, the first day the new Apple iPhone 3G S went on sale was the biggest sales day ever for the company. That’s right—the iPhone 3G S beat out the previous two iPhone launch days as well as traditionally heavy retail sales days such as Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) and the day after Christmas, December 26.

There’s no doubt the new iPhone 3G S has attracted a lot of positive attention. The iPhone 3G S sold one million phones in the first weekend it was available. By comparison, it took AT&T and Apple about two and a half months to sell one million iPhones in 2007. In addition, six million people had downloaded the iPhone OS 3.0 update in the first five days of its release.

At this point, it’s still hard to say how many iPhones have been sold to date since Apple won’t divulge sales figures until later this month when the company reports its quarterly earnings. AT&T has said it sold “hundreds of thousands” of iPhones during the pre-order period and has also indicated the iPhone 3G S sales were off the charts.


The full memo sent to AT&T employees is below:

iLaunch day 2009 was one for the record books, as AT&T customers scrambled to get their hands on the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet.

Here’s a look at some of the milestones we achieved:

• Best-ever sales day in our retail stores
• Second-largest traffic day in our retail stores
• Most transactions processed via our IT systems in a single day
• Most upgrade eligibility checks in a single day
• Largest order day in att.com history
• Largest features sales day in att.com history
  

On this year’s launch day, iPhone sales exceeded sales recorded on 2008’s iPhone launch day, Black Friday 2008 and Dec. 26, 2008–all heavy-volume sales days. In fact, this year we surpassed 2008’s launch day sales at about noon Central time, and sustained our previous peak hour record, also set in 2008, for 11 straight hours.