Apple’s second calendar quarter was a record breaking performance. This is surprising because it shows super-seasonal performance. For as long as I can remember the fourth calendar quarter (i.e. holiday) was always the strongest quarter, by a large margin. This quarter was higher than the last holiday quarter. A glance at the following chart shows … Continue reading “Apple's growth scorecard for second quarter 2011”
Almost all valuation models for Apple assume it’s a hardware company. The modeling algorithm for hardware is simple: For each year in near future For each product line Compute contribution Determine company value by summing contributions and multiplying by a P/E ratio The major difficulty is in predicting the growth of each product line. This … Continue reading “A new way to value Apple”
In the last two weeks we received two more data points which allow an update to the “race to a billion” platform growth trajectories. Android reached 130 million active users and iOS reached 200 million. The updated picture looks like this: Note again that this is a log scale graph. Every major horizontal gridline is … Continue reading “The Frontiers of Platform Adoption”
Steve Ballmer stated and Andy Lees confirmed that Microsoft views iPad and other tablets as “just PCs”. From a market measurement point of view Canalys agrees. IDC and Gartner don’t, calling the new devices “media tablets.” Before deciding whether tablets belong with PCs in market metrics, it would be interesting to look at what the … Continue reading “Is the tablet computer a new PC or post-PC?”
The following chart shows the net gains in users for the major mobile platforms in the US. The data is derived from comScore’s MobiLens report. The raw numbers for the last period (ending May) are:
About 10 years ago I met an advertising executive in New York who explained the difficulty of advertising a new brand of deodorant to consumers. “Most people never change their deodorant,” I remember him saying. “They pick one brand when they are young, and stick with it for a long, long time. If it works, … Continue reading “The Android (in)adequacy: How to tell if a platform is good enough”
My thanks to Robert van Apeldoorn, journalist for Trends Tendances Magazine, for asking good questions. My responses are reproduced below. The article (in French) is titled “Nokia a trop écouté les réseaux télécoms” and can be found in the June 23rd edition of the magazine along with more details in the article “Comment Nokia peut-il renaître?”. -About your post … Continue reading “Nokia a trop écouté les réseaux télécoms”
Ever since the iPhone launched four years ago (to the day), the question on everyone’s mind has been: When will Apple expand the portfolio to reach into all market segments? I remember thinking in 2007 whether it would be in six months or a year that they would create a “mini”, “nano” and “classic” line-up … Continue reading “The iPhone at four; growing up or just growing?”
There are 225 million iTunes account holders. 25 million joined in the three months. As the iTunes store has been operating since April 2003 it’s possible to step back and look at its history and measure the rate of growth relative to other ecosystems. The following chart shows various platforms/ecosystems in terms of adoption. In … Continue reading “Getting to one billion iTunes accounts”
The 200+ million iOS devices have caused 14 billion apps to be downloaded in less than three years. The iTunes music store caused 15 billion songs to be downloaded over a 7 year period. The two media download totals are shown in the following chart: About 9 months ago I predicted that Apps would overtake … Continue reading “Songs, Books and Apps: What do the three media types tell us about the future of consumption?”
