Apple Watch Preorders Top 2.3 Million Units Globally, Says KGI Securities Analyst

With Apple Inc. silent about official Apple Watch preorder numbers, analysts and research firms have been coming out from the woodwork with their best guesses and estimates. The latest comes from KGI Securities’ analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has extensively tracked and forecasted a number of products coming out of Apple’s pipeline. He’s now estimating that Apple Watch global preorders have come in at over 2.3 million units.

“We estimate production of Apple Watch around 2.3mn units in March-May,” Kuo wrote in a research note to investors obtained by MacRumors.

Of the three editions, Kuo expects the Apple Watch Sport, stainless steel Apple Watch and the 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition to consist of 85 percent, 15 percent and less than one percent of the total orders respectively.

Those estimates place current Apple Watch production at under a million units per month. However, production could reach 2 to 3 million units per month by June, absent any bottlenecks.

In comparison, U.S. preorders on Friday were estimated to be around 957,000 units, according to e-receipt data gathered from a panel of 2 million shoppers by market research firm Slice Intelligence. If either Kuo or Slice’s estimates are accurate, Apple is already one of the biggest smartwatch makers in the industry, even before its product hits stores, blowing past the 720,000 Android Wear devices sold in 2014, according to estimates from Canalys.