Apple's market share is 14%: iPod is on sale and hot

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) June 13, 2007 -- In reality the MP3 player market is about 56 million units (48 million MP3 playing musicphones, 8 million iPods, and 2 million non-Apple brand stand-alone MP3 players). So Apple's quarterly market share is not 77% like it was back in 2004 before musicphones. In this quarter Apple's market share is 14%

As we forecast in our book and on this blogsite, at the end of last year the battle for MP3 players shifted and is now fought in the pocket. And the undefeated world champion in that market share war is the mobile phone.

Was unavoidable

We've seen it all before. It was to be just like the brief massacre of the PDA markets - totally crushed by "smartphones" in only two years from 2000 to 2002. The world's bestselling PDA today, by a wide margin, is the Nokia Communicator - a smartphone and also by far the most expensive of all PDAs. As a result of the smartphone cannibalization of the PDA market, one of the world's largest PDA makers, Sony, totally pulled out of the PDA market in 2004. Most PDA makers rushed to bring converged devices in a defensive mode, with cellular phone capability added to the PDAs.

Then we witnessed the equally brief and lopsided market battle of the digital cameras where cameraphones emerged victorious also in just two short years. From 2004 the world's bestselling digital camera brand has not been a traditional camera brand like Nikon, Canon, Minolta or Kodak; the world's bestselling camera brand is been Nokia. Last year fourth-place phone manufacturer SonyEricsson alone shipped more digital cameras than all stand-alone digital cameramakers combined. And again the previous masters of this field admit defeat as the world's second largest camera manufacturer, Minolta-Konica announced in January 2006 they were quitting the camera business.

The writing was on the wall. We foresaw the brief but decisive battle where the iPod and other stand-alone MP3 players were predestined to emerge as the losers. I predicted the battle to last the full year of 2006, even I was not prepared for the total carnage that the phone makers reaped upon the iPods and other stand-alone MP3 players in only the first half of 2006. From a high of near 80% in 2004, the iPod's market share is now down to 14% - and still falling!

Source: http://yahoo.com.cn