“Needham & Co.’s Charlie Wolf this morning reiterated a Buy rating on shares of Apple (AAPL) and raised his price target to $620 from $540 after revising upward his value estimate for the iPad and Mac businesses,” Tiernan Ray reports for Barron’s.
“Writes Wolf, the introduction of Amazon.com’s (AMZN) “Kindle Fire” tablet last fall boosted the overall ‘media tablet market’ growth rate, in fact much more than he’d expected for the category,” Ray reports. “But that overall acceleration in tablets will redound to the benefit of the iPad, which, he writes, ‘has launched a massive attack on the business market,’ and in turn the Mac, given that the ‘halo effect’ of the iPad ‘has, in turn, translated into an increase in our forecast of Mac sales, which is also invading the business market.'”
“Wolf expects Apple will continue to best tablets based on Google’s (GOOG) “Android” operating system in the enterprise market because Apple has the tools required for business,” Ray reports. “Wolf cites The Diffusion of Innovations, by Everett Rodgers, who wrote about the explosion in sales of hybrid corn seeds in the 1920s. The point: adoption of technology accelerates ‘once the innovation enters the mainstream,’ tracing out an ‘S curve.'” Wolf models iPad sales of 62 million units this year, and 94 million next year, even as market share slips from 85% in 2011 to 80% this year and 75% next year. By 2012 [sic. We think he means 2014], Apple may be shipping 211 million iPads, he writes, and have 50% of the market.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]