[Olpc-open] Sales

[Kim Quirk]

Generally what happens is that many people have said "I will give you a PO
for 100k laptops in real soon". As is true with any transaction involving
millions of dollars, "real soon" is usually several months at a minimum. At
the country meetings there was a high level of enthusiasm and exchange
between people who are thinking about the XOs with people who are currently
using the XOs, that many new countries were pledging to get involved. Actual
involvement will take many more months or years for some of these countries.
I feel confident that 'taking orders' in the context of that article was
used to mean people who are serious about the program and perhaps even have
a deadline for getting involved.

Between re-orders and orders well under 100k, OLPC is doing quite well. We
are producing and shipping 50k laptops/month. The pipeline is full and there
are a number of countries who are figuring out their financing options so
they can get involved.  When the next good size new order comes in (money
exchanges hands), I believe OLPC will want to make that public and will need
to figure out how to ramp up production -- we are already in discussion
about ramping up production.

By the end of June we will have produced and shipped 400k laptops. If we
don't have any new large orders for 2008, we still expect to ship 50k/mo * 6
months = 300k more, which would be a total of 700k for the year.
Realistically we expect a few of these orders to become real so that we are
likely to ship over 1M laptops. There are many more potential orders (less
likely, but quite possible) that could push that number higher or provide a
good start to 2009.

Kim


On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On June 5, 2008, 5:00PM EST, in article
> One Laptop Meets Big Business
> The big idea of giving PCs to poor children has been challenged by
> educators and business. Here, follow the misadventures of One Laptop
> per Child
> Steve Hamm and Geri Smith of Business Week (With Nandini Lakshman in
> Mumbai) wrote:
>
> "Now pilots are running in 20 countries, distribution has begun in
> two, and about 370,000 laptops have been shipped...During the week of
> May 18, Negroponte ran a four-day conference in Cambridge that brought
> together education and tech leaders from 44 countries. About 500,000
> orders were placed, bringing the total to 750,000 outstanding orders."
>
> So is that 750K total, or 370K shipped and 750K _more_ on order,
> totaling 1.12M? Or what? Why doesn't management tell the community
> anything about sales figures?
>
> If the latter, a press release for the first million seems to be in
> order. Even if not, a press release for .5M orders would be
> appropriate. In any case, the unseemly hand-wringing over the alleged
> "failure" of a program approaching $200 million in revenue in the
> first year is the shoddiest kind of reporting.
>
> --
> Edward Cherlin
> End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
> http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
> "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay
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> Olpc-open at lists.laptop.org
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>
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