Apple Created A Special Team To Win Sony's Former Customers

reportedly formed a special team to pick up all of the enterprise customers

left behind when it exited the PC industry. "We picked up that Apple has created a dedicated account management team to cater to the large enterprises," Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry told Benzinga. Chowdhry said that a company only creates a team like that to go after a specific target. "The account management teams have to have a quota that they need to beat," said Chowdhry. "It all happened around the time when Sony said they are getting out of the business. It seemed that Apple was proactive. They realized there was going to be a [void] created because Sony was going to exit. It seems they built a dedicated team to make sure the Sony installed base goes completely Mac." Chowdhry was not sure how many Vaio users may have already switched to Mac. He estimated that Mac sales could have an upside between 500,000 and 750,000 units during the December quarter. "There's a very high probability that Mac sales could be a huge surprise," Chowdhry added.

Apple reduced the price of the

. If this move was designed to increase sales (or prevent them from declining too steeply), it seems to have worked. The company sold a

5.5 million Macs during the September quarter, beating the year-ago period by 21 percent. Sales also increased during the

and

. Sean Udall, CIO of Quantum Trading Strategies and author of The TechStrat Report, told Benzinga that he expects Apple to sell around 5.5 million units during the December quarter versus

during the year-ago period. He said sales could be as high as 5.68 million or as low as 5.4 million units. Disclosure: