Tuesday, June 11, 2013

It's alive! Delphi sales increased in 2013. Again.

In 2011, Embarcadero announced that Delphi (Rad Studio) sales had increased 15% each year for the three consecutive years since they acquired CodeGear.

Embarcadero’s Delphi Reaps Three Consecutive Years of Double Digit Growth since Acquisition from Borland

The following year, they announced an additional 54% growth over the previous year:

Embarcadero Technologies Grows Delphi and C++ by 54% in 2011

Yesterday Embarcadero announced that sales to date represent a 34% increase over 2012:

Demand for iOS Support Drives Year-Over-Year Growth in Sales for RAD Studio Development Tools

It's almost enough to make one question the whole "Delphi is dying!" meme.

4 comments:

kmorwath said...

Thereby, if me make 100% 2008, now they should have triplicated sales (313%) in five years, so it looks there is really no need to bring in more developers. Unless it's only revenues that triplicated (firing US employee, offshoring development, increase prices, force unneded upgrades...) and not the shipped products.

alcalde said...

People want to believe so strongly they're willing to let themselves be fooled by statistics. The press release only mentions "sales" being up but it's in such a vague way we can't be sure what they're measuring.

However, if they're talking about simply units sold, then the deception becomes clear. The last years they put out these releases it was around February/Q1. Now it's June. XE4 came out in April. See the problem? If you compare sales from last year, with one major product release, to a time period this year that includes two releases, of course your sales *units* will be up. On top of that, the XE4 non-iOS upgrade was only $49 vs. the normal $490 Pro upgrade. Again, of course you'll have gotten more upgraders at that price point.

I work with descriptive statistics, and trust me, this is engineered to be deceptive.It's not an even comparison; the date ranges are cherry-picked to allow them to make vague claims that people's minds will fill in with more details to tell them what they want to hear.

Bruce McGee said...

The growth described is in revenue. It has been discussed before, and if it isn't clear in the first two, it is stated explicitly in yesterday's.

Unknown said...

I don't buy the argument that these are deceptive stats. For one thing, Emb. is not a corporation which needs its shares to be sold.

I am happy Delphi is being supported despite all the bragging of ill-wishers and unfair competition