iPad sales to top 10 million in 2010?

Encouraging analyst figures, and the crack-like desire that seems to come over people on first seeing and touching an iPad, can only mean one thing, huge sales for the iPad in 2010. The only question we’re asking is not how many millions will it sell, but will it sell in to the double million figures by Christmas? With current sales and trends for slates etc we think that it could easily hit 10 million.

So Here are the “facts.” As far as we can make out the analysts have all agreed that the iPad is selling like hot cakes. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster gave an iPad launch figure of 300k from a straw poll of 50 retail stores he rang up in New York and Minneapolis. Munster now puts the iPad installed based at 1.3 million, with 1 million Wi-Fi units and 300,000 3G. He projects that the eventual split will reach 60 percent Wi-Fi and 40 percent 3G. He also expects there will be continued supply shortages thanks to high demand and low supply. All told, he expects Apple to ship 4.3 million iPads this year. If they sell 4.3 million then we think Apple will be very disappointed.

Apple haven’t really revealed many figures for the iPad, however they have said that iPad users have downloaded more than 12m apps from the App Store, where developers have created at least 5,000 apps unique to the iPad, and Apple said it had sold 1.5m eBooks from Apple’s new iBookstore.

The form factor is right for big sales, just look at the geek boy Asus Eee Pc which managed to sell 4-5 million in its first year. The Asus looked neat, but practically it was a bit of a nightmare for anyone who wasn’t au-fait with technology. It had Linux as its main operating system, it had a poor battery life, and a Wi-Fi capability that was less than perfect. Plus it was a netbook, a category that had been tried lots of times before, but had always failed to sell anything like the quantities vendors hoped for 100’s of thousands rather than millions. The netbook market is now in the tens of millions a year.

April Figures from analysts Display Search show there’s a real market out there. Their figures for the Mini-note/Netbook/Slate market for 2009 give total sales of $11.56 billion and 34.1 million devices, up from $6.65 billion sales and 16.4 million devices in 2008. It also expects “Dramatic increases in the size of the slate-style PC market are expected to be driven by the Apple iPad and slates from other PC brands that are expected to be launched this year.”

Table 1: Notebook PC and Mini-Note Units Y/Y Change (Millions)

Source: The new DisplaySearch Q1’10 Quarterly Advanced Notebook PC Shipment and Forecast Report

Table 2: Notebook PC and Mini-Note Revenue (US$ Billions)

Source: The new DisplaySearch Q1’10 Quarterly Advanced Notebook PC Shipment and Forecast Report

For Apple to launch something that didn’t quite match the Asus’ Eee PC first year sales would be a hell of a let down. The iPad looks fantastic, it’s simple to use, and it’s got the Apple hype behind it. How can it not sell more than 4.5 million?

Anyway we’re currently very happy punters here at Bmob as our 3/1 bet with Paddy Power for the iPad to sell over 6 million units in 2010 is a almost a certainty. Although to be honest, we did make another bet, this time at the even better odds of 8/1 that the iPad would sell between 5-6 million in 2010. But whatever the outcome we’re in the money.