Can one little phone impact GDP?

Sales of the new iPhone could add between a quarter and half a percentage point to annualized economic growth in the fourth quarter according to Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist for J.P. Morgan.

xTuple's new Mobile Web client (works on the iPhone, iPad and Android's) will interoperate seamlessly with the desktop client. Both will talk to the same PostgreSQL database back end and, by the end of the 4.x series, the entire application will have been ported to the Mobile Web platform. We’re not aware of any ERP vendor that has come close to doing this. One little phone can make a big difference!

As reported by Sudeeep Reddy in the Wall Street Journal:

J.P. Morgan’s equity analysts expect Apple to sell about 8 million iPhone 5 units in the final three months of the year. If the phone sells for around $600, with about $200 of it counted as imported components, then $400 per phone would figure into the government’s measure of gross domestic product. (Even though consumers may not pay that much for the phone, because of subsidies from wireless carriers, Feroli explains that phone-selling companies often report the sales based on the price of the standalone product.)

The bottom line: the iPhone 5 sales could boost GDP by $3.2 billion, or $12.8 billion at an annual rate. That amounts to an increase of 0.33 percentage point in annualized GDP growth. It could be even higher, he says. Even a third of a percentage point would limit the downside risk to J.P. Morgan’s fourth-quarter growth projection of 2%.

Feroli warns that the estimate “seems fairly large, and for that reason should be treated skeptically” but adds: “we think the recent evidence is consistent with this projection.” When the iPhone 4S became widely available last October, he writes, over half of the 0.8% increase in core retail sales came in the categories of online sales and computer and software sales. The two categories together had their largest monthly increase on record. The fourth-quarter sales growth at those stores over the third quarter would have boosted fourth-quarter growth by a tenth to a fifth of a percentage point if due to the iPhone. The iPhone 5 launch will be even bigger than that, he says, making the latest estimate “reasonable.”

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