Analyst: iPad forcing rival tablet makers to cut back

Facing unrelenting competition from Apple's iPad, many rival tablet makers will build fewer tablets than originally planned, according to a J.P. Morgan analyst.

(Credit: Apple)

In a research note released yesterday, analyst Mark Moskowitz said that non-Apple tablet makers have gotten an early "dose of reality" by failing to produce a high-volume tablet that comes close to matching the demand for the iPad.

As a result of the "weak showing" of products such as Motorola's Xoom, Research In Motion's PlayBook, and Samsung's Galaxy Tab, many tablet makers have cut back on their plans to build tablets by around 10 percent this year.

As a result, Moskowitz estimates the number of tablets that companies collectively plan to build for the year has dropped to 73 million from the 81 million he forecast in March. Among global tablet makers, only Apple, HTC, and Lenovo have kept their build plans intact since March. Other companies, such as Acer, Dell, Motorola, RIM, Toshiba, and Samsung have cut their build plans by double digit percentages.

"We do not think the first generation of tablet offerings from the non-Apple tablet hopefuls stand to offer compelling price and feature sets to drive incremental purchasers within vendors' projections," the analyst said.

By far the leader, Apple plans to build 38 million iPads this year, followed by Acer with plans to build 8 million and Samsung expecting to build 6.5 million.

Looking at the iPad, Moskowitz doesn't believe that shipments are being limited by timing or supply chain problems. The analyst still expects Apple to ship 6.75 million iPads for the quarter ending in June. For all of 2011, Moskowitz is forecasting iPad shipments of 29.6 million, giving Apple a 62 percent share of the tablet market for the year.

Despite the anticipated downturn in manufacturing non-Apple tablets, the iPad and its rivals still stand to affect the overall PC market, believes Moskowitz.

"On a relative basis, our assumptions of total tablet shipments in 2011 amount to only 3 percent and 11 percent of total handset and smartphone units, respectively. In contrast, our tablet unit assumptions amount to 32 percent and 21 percent of desktop and notebook PC units, respectively, which we think means that tablets stand to be big enough to have positive (or negative) spillover effects on the broader tech food chain."

View the original article here

Analyst: iPad Shipments Could Hit 45 Million In 2011

Asian components suppliers say Apple could ship between 40 and 45 million iPads in 2011—as much as 15 million more than generally forecast by analysts, Ticonderoga Securities analyst Brian White said Thursday.

White told Apple Insider that he had previously heard such bullish figures from Asian sources last year. But "at the time, this number was difficult for many investors and some in the media to get their head around."

Ticonderoga Securities had previously projected 2011 global unit shipments for the iPad and iPad 2 in the neighborhood of 31 million while Needham & Company has set the number at 30 million and RBC Capital Markets puts it at 28 million.

Industry research firm IDC is currently forecasting total worldwide media tablet shipments of 50.4 million for 2011 including "more than 30 million unit shipments of the iPad," said media tablet analyst Susan Kevorkian.

IDC's total media tablet figure includes devices running non-iOS operating systems like Google's Android, Hewlett-Packard's WebOS and Research in Motion's BlackBerry Tablet OS—though such products have largely been eclipsed by the iPad to date or else aren't set to be released until later in the year.

IDC forecasts global media tablet shipments of 70.8 million units in 2012.

White's account of his talks with components suppliers in Taiwan and China punctuated a whirlwind of media tablet fanfare, leaks and rumors over the past several days—not all of it iPad-centric.

Earlier this week, IDC and Gartner both attributed a first-quarter year-over-year decline in worldwide PC shipments in part to the rise of media tablets as competition for consumers' dollars.

Meanwhile, a leaked version of the WebOS 3.0 SDK offered a sneak peek at the long-awaited first-generation TouchPad tablet which HP will reportedly release in the summer. RIM's first tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, will go on sale next week and PCMag.com has a review of the device ahead of the launch.

Intel's media tablet efforts were also in the news Thursday. The chip giant this week began shipping its new Atom-based "Oak Trail" hardware platform for tablets and netbooks with support for the Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system.

Now comes a report from DigiTimes that Intel and Google will announce a joint Android 3.0 tablet initiative called "PRC Plus" in the third quarter of 2011 "after nearly half a year of negotiations," according to unnamed sources at notebook manufacturers.

Additionally, Intel will begin offering tablet makers a $10 subsidy for each Intel-based tablet they make, according to the unconfirmed DigiTimes report.

Intel has struggled to date to position its x86-based chips against the ARM-based chips that makers of smartphones and media tablets have almost exclusively used in products currently on the market.

For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag.

View the original article here