The New Year is less than three weeks away and Apple’s 2011 numbers are on the minds of many. We know Apple’s done well with the introduction of the iPad, new iPhone 4 and the recently released MacBook Air, but how will they fare in the coming year?
Given the ever growing popularity of the iPad, and the amount of Android tablets about to be released, the entire tablet market should witness impressive growth figures next year.
While this is good news for manufacturers like Apple, Motorola, Samsung and many others, the popularity of tablets is making PC manufacturers cringe.
According to a note issued by Bill Shope from Goldman Sachs, tablets will most likely cannibalize a sizable chunk of the PC market next year, as 20 million potential PC buyers are expected to turn to tablets instead.
Shope is currently expecting tablet manufacturers to ship about 55 million tablets next year, an impressive number that will heavily impact the growth of the PC market, by as much as 35 percent.
With a growing number of companies jumping into the tablet market with their own devices, the market has quickly become one of the fastest growing consumer electronics segments. Companies like Apple are aggressively expanding their market reach by including retailers such as Walmart, Target, AT&T and Verizon, often at the expense of more established PC manufacturers.
For PC makers, everything’s not lost though, as the PC market is still expected to grow, albeit at a much lower pace.
According to a report on All Things Digital, Goldman Sachs’s Bill Shope is forecasting the sale of 54.7 million tablets will be sold next year, of which 37.2 million will be iPads. Pretty impressive, right? Well, if you include iPads in the personal computing market, things are looking even better than that for Apple. Shope is predicting Apple’s overall share of the global PC market to nearly triple this fiscal year, making Apple “one of the largest vendors in the global personal computing market.”
Apple’s PC market share has hovered under 5 percent for most of the past fifteen years but the strength of iPad sales has that number poised to change. Shope said, “If we include tablets in our PC unit forecast, then our estimates suggest Apple’s combined iPad and Mac market share would reach 12 percent in 2011.” Such an increase would mean a significant change to the PC market and great news for Apple. As a matter of fact, Shope is also forecasting Apple’s stock (AAPL) to reach $430.
COMMENTARY: I am going to go out on a limb again, and predict that the Apple iPad will sell not sell anywhere close to 37.2 million iPads by the end of 2011. I think Apple will sell 20 million iPads in 2011. My forecast will depend on how good the new iPad will be, which will replace the nearly one-year old original iPad. The new iPad cannot be incrementally better than the older version, but must be a leap forward in technology, exceeding the power, features and capabilities of all the new tablets that will be introduced 2011.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab, RIM BlackBerry PlayBook and Barnes & Noble Nook Color and even the Amazon.com Kindle will push Apple to the limit. I have reviewed all three of the above, and they are all very impressive. The iPad is no longer the only game in town, and Apple no longer has the lead it had when it first introduced the iPad.
There are now over a dozen Android tablet PC's, either introduced or in the works, and everybody is wondering when Google will introduce their long rumored tablet PC. Will it run the Android or Chrome operating system? I hope its Chrome because it makes the most sense. They are already beta-testing their Chrome Notebook (I'm on the waiting list), and it's quite possible a future Google tablet PC will incorporate some of the same features, including a touchscreen and regular keyboard (I hope).
Anyway, it's fund making predictions.
Courtesy of an article dated December 13, 2010 appearing in PadGadget and an article dated December 15, 2010 appearing in PadGadget
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