Sunday, October 30, 2011

Tablet PC market report: Apple king through at least 2014

Apple RumorsHere are your Apple news items and rumors for Thursday:

Gartner Lays Out the Tablet Market; iPad on Top For a While to Come: Research group Gartner released its latest report on the tablet PC market on Thursday, breaking down how it expects Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and others to perform across the holiday season. The short version: Apple will perform. Others won��t. The group believes a total of 63.6 million tablets will be sold to retailers before the year is out, compared to just 17.6 million in 2010. More than 73% of those tablets will be iPads. The group expects Apple to maintain market dominance through 2014 when it still will control more than 50% of the market. As for tablets using Google��s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android operating system, Gartner lowered its expectations from 28% of the market to just above 17%. The only reason Gartner believes Android tablets will maintain that much control of the market is because of ��success in low-cost Asian markets and strong expectations for Amazon��s (NASDAQ:AMZN) forthcoming tablet.��

Apple Continues Shift Away From Samsung Components: While Apple and Samsung (PINK:SSNLF) continue to try to sue the pants off one another over patent infringements in their respective mobile products, Apple has remained one of Samsung��s biggest component clients. Word came out in June, however, that Apple would not use Samsung to manufacture the custom, ARM Holdings-based (NASDAQ:ARMH) A6 chip — a successor to the A5 chip used in the current iPad — when it began production in 2012. A Thursday report in DigiTimes (via TUAW) said now Apple is dropping Samsung as the supplier of DRA! M and NA ND memory parts used in its products, buying instead from Toshiba and Elpida. Samsung is contracted to produce $7.8 billion in parts for Apple across all of 2011. The loss of that business could hurt the company a whole lot more than a patent lawsuit.

Once an iPhone User, Always an iPhone User: Paranoid investors terrified that the Apple bubble soon will burst might find reassurance in a new report from UBS Investment Research. Reprinted in a Thursday report at Apple Insider, UBS�� report said that 89% of iPhone users will continue to use Apple��s smartphones. Apple��s retention rate trounces the competition. Its closest competitor is HTC, which enjoys a retention rate of 39%. Samsung��s retention rate is 28%, while Motorola Mobility‘s (NYSE:MMI) is 25% — a figure that can��t thrill Google.

As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here. Follow him on Twitter at?@ajohnagnello?and?become a fan of?InvestorPlace on Facebook.

Tags: MO ,This stock may surge above its recent all-time high

No comments:

Post a Comment