“Citigroup’s Walter Pritchard, Richard Gardner, Mark Mahaney, and Glen Yeung late last night offered up an update to Citi’s thinking about tablet computers, based on a survey of 1,800 consumers in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and China conducted through online surveys in July and August,” Tiernan Ray reports for Barron’s. “Broad conclusions are that the tablet computer could be a personal computer replacement in China, though maybe not in developed markets, and that the dominance of Apple’s iPad has increased since Citi conducted a similar survey in November of last year.”
“Tablet computer ownership has jumped from 3% to 18% of survey respondents since the year-earlier study, they write,” Ray reports. “Interestingly, so has PC ownership: laptops are now owned by 81%, up from 62%. Smartphone use has gone from 28% to 59%. The number of people intending to buy a tablet has risen from 14% to 31%… Those considering a tablet now express a preference for Apple 77% of the time versus 73% back in November. Interest in Microsoft’s Windows on a tablet has slipped from 52% to 40%, while enthusiasm for Google’s (GOOG) “Android” software on a tablet is ‘stable’ at 36% versus 38% a year earlier.”
Ray reports, “Out of 75 million tablet units that may be shipped in 2012, ‘We currently forecast 50 million iPads for, but Apple appears on track to sell >45M units in CY11, suggesting our estimate is likely conservative,’ they write. ‘Every 1M iPads is worth $0.04-0.05 of incremental EPS (depending on mix).'”
Read more in the full article here.
Another author confusing the iPad for a tablet. When are they going to get that there is an iPad market, and a tablet market? There may be some overlap, but it ain’t much.
The only reason the “rest of the tablet market” has their current percentage share is because they are “shipping” products into retail inventory in large quantity. Eventually, when the inevitable fire sale comes, they will get sold off once the price drops low enough (HP TouchPad for example). Therefore, those money-losing desperation sales count in the percentage of non-iPad sales.
Over time, the competition will start to give up trying to compete directly with iPad (and not “ship” as much). Then, iPad’s market share will climb well above 80%. The remainder will go the competition targeting niches that Apple intentionally ignores, such as ultra-cheap tablets, tablets with slide-out keyboard, and huge “tablets” that are too heavy to hold comfortably.
77% share for iPad is more realistic than 65-68% by IDC that they made up.
“An online survey of 1800”
Intriguing. As statistics gets pushed further down into the K12 curriculum, the misuse of stats and surveys gets more and more pronounced. And the public misunderstanding of numbers and data gets more profound. Pope was prescient: “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”