The contest among established Wall Street analysts to see who can make the most dramatic bull case for investing in Apple appears to be gathering steam. The newest entry came late yesterday from Katy Huberty of Morgan Stanley, who brings the advantage of having been right fairly often in the past.
Still, her forecast is an eye-popper: Apple had 30m iPhone subscribers at the end of last year, and she said it should have better than triple that number–exceeding the nice, round figure of 100m–by the end of 2011.
Ms Huberty’s math tops that of JP Morgan’s Mark Moskowitz, who said Wednesday that Apple could reach a sales rate of 40m annual units this year. With two-year carrier contracts the standard, it would take a while to get to 100m active subscribers.
Ms Huberty starts with the system-destroying first-day deluge of 600,000 orders for the new iPhone 4, which reaches stores on Thursday. She then adds the results of a Morgan Stanley survey finding that half the current crop of owners plan to upgrade, double the usual proportion, apparently taking that as an indicator of product popularity that will bring in first-time customers as well.
Another factor is AT&T’s recent introduction of tiered pricing plans, which make the gadgets more affordable for non-power users. Ms Huberty’s brief report doesn’t mention the speculated addition of another big US carrier, such as Verizon, but that would certainly make the prognosis more credible.
Then there’s Apple’s side project, iPad. Next to 100m, perhaps the 2m of those sold in the first two months doesn’t seem as impressive.
But market researchers IDC and Forrester are here to help. IDC said last month that “media tablets” will grow from 7.6m units being shipped this year to 46m in 2014, for annual growth rate of above 57 per cent. It said there should be about 400m “portable PCs” sold that year.
Forrester came out today with a similar conclusion: tablets, which it defines as a type of PC, will account for 23 per cent of PCs sold to consumers by 2015.
In fact, it said the only type of computer that will decline in annual until sales between now and then is the desktop variety. Steve Ballmer, take note.
