Pixel 6 hit: Google claims ‘record sales’ in Q4 2021

The Pixel 6 is one of the best phones Google has ever made, and the market seems to be rewarding Google for it. Today, in Alphabet’s fourth quarter 2021 earnings report, the company released a rare comment about its hardware sales. CEO Sundar Pichai called “a quarterly sales record for our Pixel phones.”Technically, its announcement includes the Pixel 6 and the cheaper Pixel 5a, but this is the first quarter of Pixel 6 availability, and the Pixel a series doesn’t change much from year to year.

Here is Pichai’s earnings statement:

In the fourth quarter, we set a Pixel quarterly sales record. This happened despite an extremely difficult situation in the supply chain. The response from our customers and carrier partners to the Pixel 6 has been incredibly positive.

Google never offers specific numbers for Pixel sales, and today the company hasn’t changed that habit. According to IDC, the largest number of shipments of Google phones came in 2019, when the Pixel series was first released. Google only shipped 7 million units in the entire year (the company would have done better if it had really tried to become a global manufacturer). Pixel distribution is currently the worst ever, with the Pixel 6 only available in nine countries and the Pixel 5a only being sold in two countries. The Samsung or Apple phone is sold in more than 100 countries, and each of them sells between 200 and 300 million phones a year.

Early supply chain reports from Nikkei Asia said that Google “has high hopes for the Pixel 6 lineup and is asking suppliers to prepare 50% more phone manufacturing capacity compared to pre-pandemic levels in 2019.”But even that wasn’t enough, as the Pixel 6 consistently sold out as soon as it was announced, disappointing many potential buyers.

It’s not hard to see why the Pixel 6 is doing so well. The Google 6 is the first Google phone in recent memory to ship without any of the much-criticized hardware. The Pixel 5 has dropped out of the flagship race to become a mid-range phone. The Pixel 4 had Face ID and a radar gesture system that didn’t work properly, and the Pixel 3 had a ridiculously large notch on the screen. The Pixel 6, on the other hand, is a fairly conventional flagship smartphone with a beautiful design, brand new camera hardware, and a price tag that’s about $300 less than its closest rivals Samsung or OnePlus. It comes with Google’s beautiful new Android 12 OS, and an iPhone-like software update from Google gets around all the usual Android fragmentation annoyances.

The only thing Google messed up with the Pixel 6 is that the phone was thrown out the door due to a few software bugs. In addition, the company missed the first two monthly security updates. However, with the January patch finally out, we hope we can just chalk it up to a brand new chip and some early growth issues.