Google shipped 3.9 million Pixel phones last year, IDC says
But that's only a fragment of the overall market for smartphones, which is a billion and a half units.
IDC says Google shipped 3.9 million Pixel devices in 2017.
Google won't say how many Pixel phones it shipped in 2017, but one analyst from the research firm IDC has a number: 3.9 million.
The analyst, IDC Research Director Francisco Jeronimo, said the figure includes both generations of the phone, the Pixel 1 and 2. For comparison, it's a "tiny portion" compared with the entire 1.5 billion market size for smartphones altogether, Jeronimo said. And it's just a sliver compared with the 77.3 million iPhones Apple sold in the last quarter alone.
A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.
Though the numbers are small, the good news for Google is that they're growing. Jeronimo said Google doubled its Pixel sales in the last year.
Google debuted the Pixel, the search giant's first branded phone, in October 2016, and unveiled the second generation of the device exactly one year later. The company has made a serious investment in hardware. In 2016, Google brought in former Motorola executive Rick Osterloh to lead its hardware division, which includes its Google Home smart speakers, Chromecast streaming devices and Google Wi-Fi routers.
The company also said last year it made a $1 billion investment in hardware maker HTC to bring to Google 2,000 engineers, many of whom worked on the Pixel. And the search giant's hardware division keeps growing. Last week, Google said it's folding Nest, the smart device maker, into the Google hardware team, after Nest was spun out into a separate company under Google's parent Alphabet in 2015.