Google admits Pixel 3 sales have fallen year over year

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  The Pixel 3 XL. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Alphabet, Google's parent company, had its earnings call yesterday, and, while these calls are primarily about advertising click-through rates and traffic-acquisition costs, yesterday's call actually contained some information about Google's smartphone sales. It turns out sales of the Google Pixel flagship are down year over year, meaning the Pixel 3 is selling worse than the Pixel 2.

Here's the full quote from Alphabet and Google CFO Ruth Porat:

Hardware results reflect lower year-on-year sales of Pixel, reflecting in part heavy promotional activity industry-wide given some of the recent pressures in the premium smartphone market.

"Recent pressures in the premium smartphone market" can mean a lot of things, but basically Google is admitting that there is some tough competition out there for the Pixel 3 and that the phone isn't selling as well as its predecessor. Google doesn't break out "hardware results" in its earnings report, so we can only guess at what the year-over-year difference is. It was bad enough to mention in an earnings call, though.

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