Fortune highlights a recent investor report from Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster and in short, April looks to have been a great month for Apple with Mac sales up an impressive 33% year over year, well above the 19% increase expected by Wall Street. Munster anticipates that Apple will report Mac sales of 3.1 to 3.2 million for the June quarter.
And while Mac sales are booming, iPod sales are trending downwards, with sales down 17% year over year – considerably worse than the 9% fall off Munster was initially expecting. Munster attributes this differential to the recent iPad release, hypothesizing that iPad sales are cannibalizing iPod sales.
April NPD data gives us the first sign of the degree to which the iPad cannibalizes iPod or Mac sales. From the early NPD data, it appears that the iPad has a minimal cannibalization impact on Mac sales, and could be slightly cannibalizing iPod sales. Given the [average selling price] (4x) and margin profile of the iPad, we see this as a net positive for Apple’s business.
Earlier this month, data compiled by Morgan Stanley indicated that the iPad was indeed having a noticeable cannibalization effect on a range of devices, from netbooks to desktops and, of course, iPod Touches.
The chart below shows what % of people surveyed were bypassing previously planned consumer electronic purchases in favor of the iPad. As you can see, the MacBook and the iPod Touch are the top two iPad victims, but as Apple executives have reiterated many times in the past, if there’s going to be product cannibalization, Apple prefers to have it be the result of its own products.
May 17th, 2010 at 3:25 pm
Your RSS feed still says iPAD sales slump… you might want to fix that as well as the title.