I am ‘that’ Tomi Ahonen who made that blog posting.

Thanks for mentioning my comment. I am here to mention a few relevant points. First – that you do have my quote correctly, it is in context, that is what I wrote. Obviously I wrote it more than a week prior to Apple’s quarterly results and I stood by it until we had Apple’s results.

There was a pattern we saw in January of 2008 and in January of 2009, that after Christmas, Apple iPhone sales fall dramatically. That same pattern also repeated from the iPod. It was not only me thinking so, in fact EVERY ONE of the major published analysts of iPhone forecasts for January quarter of 2010 suggested this same phenomenon – over 40 of them. Not one analyst suggested that there was a pattern of iPhone sales increasing after Christmas.

My forecast – on my blog – was for 7.4 Million iPhone unit sales in Q1 of 2010. That was clearly off as Apple’s quarter reported 8.75 Million unit sales. But please note, that the ‘street average’ estimate was for 7.1 Million iPhones with most estimates between 6.8 million and 7.5 million. I was at the top end of all forecasts for this quarter. Where every forecaster was wrong, I was at least among those who were ‘least bit wrong’ haha.

I am very honest about my numbers. I Tweeted within a minute of the announced numbers that my forecast had been too low. I wrote on my blog to that very blog story – an IMMEDIATE update to the top of the blog article, that Apple’s quarterly results reveal my Q1 forecast to have been wrong – and I point out about the major themes of that blog article – that the new numbers ‘do not support my hypothesis’. I think this shows honesty and respect of my readers. I don’t see most of the other analysts coming back on the same day to show how wrong their forecast had been and warn readers that after the numbers came in, some assumptions of the analysis are now subject to new interpretation. Within two hours I also wrote a longer blog explaining what numbers had been reported by Apple and why these were a change to Apple’s pattern and why that is relevant to the industry.

But most of all, I am passionate about my numbers. I knew the whole analyst industry was stumped this Q1 of 2010 nobody got it right. So where were the numbers? I went on an immediate search and re-analysis and digging through the data, and I found the ‘missing million’ new iPhone buyers that had suddenly appeared in January of 2010. I posted that update as a separate blog entry explaining that it was the gift-giving period of the Lunar New Year in China which this year was in early February (Chinese Year of the Tiger started on Feb 14). My analysis has since been quoted rather widely and found to be consistent with the facts by many of my peers. I could say, I ‘broke’ the story of where are the ‘missing millions’. I think this is also a sign of a responsible forecaster, to admit when they were wrong, and then try to find out why.

I hope your readers can take these as points to consider when comparing me to perhaps another forecaster they may have read who also predicted something like 7.1 million iPhone sales this past quarter.

Thank you

Tomi Ahonen
Twittering as @tomiahonen
wwww tomiahonen com