iPad

I am sure many of you have seen Trefis.com and it’s glitzy interface – the site allows you view palettes of products major corporations have and to get some insight into relative (financial) importance each product has on the company’s bottom line.

I’ve played with Apple a bit – the iPad unit sales projections Trefis has are, in my eyes, a bit optimistic (30M by 2014) – but hey, Trefis allows you to modify the scenario, drop or jack up the numbers – if they are wrong – go ahead an correct them. The GUI is super nice…

Screenshots below – first the relative importance of each product to Apple:

…Trefis’ iPad Unit Sales projections:

Again, I think Trefis is a bit optimistic but still relatively aligned with some early projections that around 10M units might be sold in 2010 (see the first projections here http://ipad.org/more-on-sales-projection/)

Prediction Markets (aka predictive markets or idea futures) have been accepted as an official decision making tool in some industries and a handful of leading companies (e.g., HP) are using them – in short, prediction markets harness the collective predictive instincts and provide an additional data point for decision-makers.

One such market is established for iPad sales estimates (see HubDub.com’s page for the source) – the current leading estimate is +6M sold iPad units in 2010. We should treat the numbers published carefully as only 56 folks had engaged in the prediction game.

Follow the link and drop a vote

About HubDub.com

Hubdub is brought to you by 4 guys and a gal in a garage in Edinburgh, Scotland.

On Hubdub you stake virtual money (H$ – Hubdub dollars) on predictions about the outcomes of real news stories. If you’re right you win more, if you’re wrong you lose what you staked. The more Hubdub dollars you have, the better Hubdubber you are (shown by your star level) and the higher on the leaderboards you climb.

Two more blurbs on sales projections and production targets:

• Yair Reiner (Oppenheimer) believes that Apple is still targeting a production run/sales projections of 10 million iPads for the calendar year.
• Craig Berger (FBR Capital Markets) believes that Apple has production targets of 5 million for the first half of 2010.

Needless to say the stock is 400% up since begining of last year (Source CNN Money)

The projections come via Gartner.com (Angela McIntyre, Analyst): “The most likely scenario for iPad sales this year is 4.2 million” – Gartner is underlying high price and limited technical capabilities as factors limiting sales potential. I could not find the source article, here is the link to the analyst’s homepage. TheStreet has some of the content published here.