Apple Retains Majority of Tablet Shipments in 4Q11 as Kindle Fire Drives Android Momentum

[MacinDoc]

Apple also reports shipments to retailers as sales.

Only the sales reported from its own stores are to end users.



Sometimes, but not for long. Once a product has been for sale for a month or so, then shipments pretty much match sales, because by then the retailers have gotten a good feel for throughput.



Yep, eventually. We've all seen plenty of older devices sitting on retailer shelves at times, though.



Actually, the quoted inventory channel numbers are not what's on retailer shelves, but rather what Apple has held in reserve to meet future requests.

(I.e. when Apple reports increasing to 6 - 8 weeks' worth of channel inventory, that's NOT what's sitting in all the retailer warehouses in the world. That would not only be insane, it would be illegal channel stuffing. It's Apple's job to keep inventory ready for old or new market sales.)

The reason Apple reports their channel inventory is because it's important to know if they're producing too much or too little for demand. (It also used to be a good clue as to when a new model was coming out, although that's less helpful now that Apple continues to sell older models as lower priced entries.)

The only time that their channel inventory report translates to likely extra end user sales, is when the number radically diminishes with no other possible explanation (like a new model coming out, or factory problems). At that point, it's assumed that end-user demand is extra high and thus so is retailer demand.

Well-reasoned post. The only point I would dispute is your contention that inventory levels out after one month. While this is true for products that are close to equilibrium between production and sales at the time of introduction, it has not applied to iPads, which have taken a considerably longer time to reach that equilibrium, and to some of the failed competition, such as the RIM Playbook, which had to be sold at a significant loss in order to clear the excessive inventory (I believe that it was estimated that only 10-20% of the inventory shipped to stores was ever sold at the retail price). So the comparison of shipments in this area may not be as good an estimator of market share as we might otherwise expect.

----------

Plus you can share content with multiple devices (for ebooks the iPad down to the lowly $79 Kindle).

That's flexibility Apple still doesn't offer.

Huh? I've been sharing content between my iPods, iPhones, iPads and Macs since the iPod first came to Canada.

 

[Buildbright]

These numbers are subject. Another research firm has the iPad at 78%. Also if we want to be fair. If a 7" kindle fire is a tablet so is a iPod touch! lol

 

[harmayanigrenge]

IDC predicts that Android as a whole will overtake iOS in market share by 2015, but Apple's single-vendor strategy will see the company maintain its dominance in revenue through the end of the 2016 forecast period and beyond.IDC's data measures shipments into the sales channel and not sales to end users, meaning that its data includes units sitting on store shelves that are not being purchased by customers. Given that Apple has repeatedly noted that it is selling every iPad it can make and other vendors have had difficulty moving their products off of store shelves, Apple has generally been regarded as having a higher end-user market share than suggested by IDC's numbers. But with the apparent success of the Kindle Fire, that disparity in shipments versus sales may be shrinking somewhat.