AT&T has sold just 10,000 Moto Z2 Force phones since launch, but Motorola's US market share has grown

Motorola is betting big on the Moto Z2 Force this year. With no Moto Z2 on the market, all of the pressure is on the Moto Z2 Force to carry the Lenovo-owned company’s flagship banner in 2017. Unfortunately, that isn’t all going to plan – at least not at AT&T.

According to new research, only 10,000 Moto Z2 Force phones have been sold through AT&T since the device’s August launch. By comparison, Verizon is thought to have sold ten times that amount, having put around 100,000 Moto Z2 Force handsets in consumers’ pockets between August and October.

This isn’t totally unexpected of course. The Moto brand’s elite smartphones have become synonymous with Verizon in recent years, including the carrier-exclusive Moto Z Force Droid. Verizon customers are very familiar with Motorola phones as a result, and the company’s customer base is now full of Moto fans.

This all changed with the Moto Z2 Force, as Motorola decided to bring its latest flagship to all four major carriers. It also reportedly backed the shatterproof phone with a $200 million marketing campaign, but unfortunately, considering AT&T’s estimated numbers, it appears that the device has not met the company’s sales expectations.

What makes the AT&T figure so surprising is the seemingly low uptake of the incredible promotion running alongside the Moto Z2 Force, that saw the carrier give away a free Moto Insta-Share Projector mod worth a whopping $300 with each device.

The sales data, which was tracked and collected by BayStreet Research, also estimates that T-Mobile sold 20,000 units over the same period, while Sprint sold around 15,000 units.

Despite the low sales, Motorola does have something to celebrate as the company has almost doubled its market share in the US year-over-year in the third quarter. According to Strategy Analytics, the Chicago-based company shipped 2.1 million smartphones during the period which represents a 91% increase over the 1.1 million sold in the same quarter in 2016.

The data makes Motorola the fifth largest smartphone manufacturer in the US for Q3 2017 – behind Apple, Samsung, LG, ZTE – with 5.2% market share.