“Prepare yourself now for some triumphant headlines in the coming months from rivals of Apple’s iPod – along the lines of ‘Apple MP3 player market share drops’. And you know what? Apple half-expects them too. Why? Because its new iPod Nano is going to be so hugely successful, taking over as the world’s most popular MP3 player from the iPod Mini, which it replaces,” Charles Arthur writes for The Register. “You’re saying, ‘Huh? How can it go down and also be popular?’ The trick is this: Apple’s putative loss of market share is going to be in the market for MP3 players with hard drives.”
Arthur writes, “Apple is already pre-eminent in the Flash market. On 1 January, Apple had zero per cent share of the market for Flash-based players. By the end of June, according to the NPD Group, it had a 46.3 per cent share of the US Flash-player market. Only Sandisk came close, with 10.8 per cent – and even that was less than 1GB iPod Shuffle, which had 11.9 per cent of the market.” [You can see more numbers here.]
Arthur continues, “As the iPod Nano is entirely Flash-based, it’s going to skew those numbers way, way up, and push the rest further into single digits – or past the decimal point. Creative has just 2.4 per cent of the US market, according to NPD’s numbers. Yet Danika Cleary, the Queen of iPod (OK, head of iPod marketing), admits: ‘The [iPod’s] hard drive market share might appear to fall.’ Ye Gods! Hold the front page! …You don’t have to be an analyst to know that the iPod Nano is going to sell by the truckload. You just have to see one, hold one. So overall, Apple’s share of the MP3 player market will probably increase… [Apple’s iPod competitors will] put out the press releases touting the apparent rise in their market share – I’m sure Creative is getting ready – but their problems are only getting bigger.”
Full article here.
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Related article:
Apple stomps competitors in flash-based MP3 player market – September 02, 2005
Apple’s iPod shuffle takes nearly 60 percent of US flash-player market in March – May 04, 2005
