“I give them two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake,” Channel Marketing Corp. president David Goldstein told Businessweek as Apple (AAPL) was launching its first foray into computer retailing. Ten years later, let’s look at the numbers:
- 325 stores in 11 countries, 87 outside the U.S.
- 2.5 million square feet of retail space (as of Sept. 2010)
- 30,200 employees (or full-time equivalents)
- 71.1 million visitors last quarter, up 51% year over year
- 13,400 visitors per store per week, on average
- $3.19 billion revenue last quarter, up 90%
- $9.9 million average revenue per store last quarter, up 67%
- 12.9% share of Apple’s total revenue last quarter
- 797,000 Macs sold in stores last quarter, half to people who’d never owned a Mac before
- 26 million Windows users have switched to Macs since 2004, according to Needham’s Charlie Wolf
Below: Steve Jobs giving a video preview of the store that opened in Tyson’s Corner, Va. on May 19, 2001. Note how excited he is to have 300 software titles on display. Today Apple boasts more than 350,000 apps for the iPhone alone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBMR3FUNsD4
