Analyst ups iPad sales estimate by 30%
BMO Capital's Keith Bachman is bullish on Apple, and not in a small way. After bumping his target price for AAPL from $250 to $265 (keeping in mind that it's hovering around $227 now), he sent out a letter to clients cited by Phil Elmer-DeWitt at Apple 2.0 that explained the rationale behind the renewed optimism.
Along with upside anticipation for Mac and iPod sales, Bachman gave a major collagen injection to his iPad sales projections. He's now considering his original fiscal 2010 target of 2.5 million iPads sold to be a conservative number, and he's looking at a possible 7.2 million devices moved for FY 2011. Considering he was originally citing a 5.5m outlook for 2011, that's a big shift, and it gets him more in line with estimates from Gene Munster and other analysts.
Bachman bases his new numbers on his confidence in continued growth for both the ereader and netbook market segments, and Apple's ability to pick up more than 1/3 of the total sales in that space for 2010. It's a positive forecast -- and you have to think that Barnes & Noble, Sony and Amazon's potential customers are strongly considering iPads as an alternative to ereader-only purchases -- but it might be overenthusiastic to start counting those chickens before the iPad has a chance to spend a little time in the hands of real users.
