Motorola shipping (and not necessarily selling) a disappointing 100,000 Moto X phones a week

Reuters reports that Motorola is currently shipping 100,000 Moto X handsets a week – though not necessarily selling this number.

Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside said “When you set up to ramp a factory you need a plan, and we have shipment targets we need to make with our carrier partners, and where we need to be right now is 100,000 units and that’s where we are.”

Woodside would say only that direct sales to customers were “substantial”. Either way, we suspect the company must be secretly disappointed in the numbers … 

To put them into perspective, Motorola’s 400k sales a month compares to 10M for the Samsung S4 and 7M in the first nine days for Apple’s iPhone 5 (which is being predicted to be in the 10-13M range this time around).

Motorola hoped that its customization options, patriotic boast of being assembled in America and reputed $500M spend on marketing would achieve a place in the big boys’ league, but so far at least the plant capacity of  “tens of millions” of phones a year is looking just a little excessive.