In the most thorough and aggressive sales forecast analysis yet that we've seen for the Google/Asus Nexus 7 Tablet, website Tech-Thoughts has published a breakdown using supply chain data as well as industry sources and manufacturing timelines to estimate a total sales volume estimate of the Nexus 7 in 2012 as between 6 and 8 million units. This is a substantial increase over estimates we first heard about a couple of weeks ago based on a Digitimes article that put sales for 2012 at about 4 million units. It does seem however that Google has been surprised by the strong demand of the tablet and has raised estimates...and orders and that sales figures will be substantially higher than they initially anticipated.
Starting with some benchmark figures of some previous hot tablet launches as shown below, the analyst for the site was able to make some assumptions about quarter over quarter volume growth after an initial launch as seen below. A lesson learned from this chart is that new entrants in the market have had virtually no effect on the sales growth of competing tablets...most likely because the tablet sector is so young. An estimate of 30%-40% of QoQ growth is also gotten from these past examples
Starting with what we know about the initial production run of 600,000 units plus the sell through rate of both the 16GB version (1 week) and the 8GB version (3 weeks) and supply chain data that shows about 4 million units produced in the first month we get the chart below that shows actual sales of about 3 million of the tablets in Q3.
Moving on to estimates for Q4 the site than looks at some benchmark figures of some previous hot tablet launches as shown below, the analyst for the site was able to make some assumptions about quarter over quarter volume growth after an initial launch as seen below. A lesson learned from this chart is that new entrants in the market have had virtually no effect on the sales growth of competing tablets...most likely because the tablet sector is so young. An estimate of 30%-40% of QoQ growth is also gotten from these past examples
Using a 35% QoQ mean estimate from the above, with an assumption that because of strong demand sales are unlikely to fall during the holiday season they come to the conclusion that another 3-5 million units will likely sell in Q4 bringing the total for 2012 to 6-8 million units.
Now granted there are some big assumptions in here and for all the details you'll want to hit the source link below to see how they figured out some of the specifics. But it seems pretty certain from their assumptions and the data that is known that the Nexus 7 is selling far better than initial forecasts predicted and we wouldn't be surprised to see these figures continue to grow as we reach 2013.
Source:
Tech-Thoughts
