Apple to sell 65M iPads in 2011?
The current scuttlebutt says that Apple will be building 65 million iPads (the original and the iPad 2) in 2011, so we must assume that they plan on selling that many. Can they really sell that many tablet computers?
The harbinger of rumors and news for all things iPhone and iPad, DigiTimes of Taiwan, has reported that Apple has informed suppliers that it plans to place orders for 65 million 9.7-inch iPad displays for calendar 2011. That is well above the 45-48 million iPads that most analysts expect them to sell next year after gazing deeply into their crystal balls. The obvious question is, “Where is Apple likely to sell that extra 20 million iPads?”
Everyone knows where they are getting their displays, according to an AppleInsider story: over the life of the iPad so far, they have mostly been purchased from LG and Samsung. Now, apparently, Apple is bringing on Chimei Innolux as a new source of displays, and when you total up the number of screens they expect to order in 2011, the total comes to 65 million among the three suppliers. It also appears that the company has stockpiled some original iPads in the inventory chain to get them through the period needed to change over to the iPad 2.
Meanwhile, all of Apple’s competition seems to be running into a brick wall trying to make some headway in the tablet marketplace. Part of that is apparently because no one else can match the economies of scale that Apple can master given the huge quantities of tablets they are building. It is much cheaper to build each one of Apples millions of iPads than it is to build each one of the mere thousands of tablets being sold by other companies.
Of course, low build prices makes it possible for Apple to sell the iPad at good prices, and it probably has some aces up its sleeve to explain the 20 million that are unaccounted for. Apple has not really started to sell the iPad to businesses yet, and there have been a number of rumors about a CDMA iPad, or perhaps even a “World iPad” that would work on different wireless networks. It may well be that analysts are simply not taking these things into account until they see some proof of new offerings.
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