Merrill Lynch: Apple likely to ship 4 million iPhones this year

Merrill Lynch has said in a report that Apple is likely to ship more iPhones that they have predicted. The company hopes to sell around a million units of iPhone in the year 2007.

Merrill Lynch said that they are expecting the company to ship around 4 million iPhones before expanding the production and sales in the next year.

The financial group said that the production is likely to be slow at around 200,000 and 300,000 phones per month. The company is then likely to enhance the production to around 1 million per month by the end of 2007.

If everything goes according to the plan, Apple should be able to ship more than 12 million IPhones next year.

Apple itself has said that they hope to sell around 10 million iPhone devices by the end of next year. If Merrill Lynch is correct, Apple might perform 60% better compared to their own expectations which seems to be quite modest.

Interestingly, this is quite opposite of what Forbes said in its report. The financial magazine said that the Apple’s expectations are quite optimistic considering the carrier exclusivity as well as the pricing.