Whether or not Apple's iPad has eaten into consumer notebook sales has been debated much of the year, and now two leading analysts say they see a similar tablet incursion coming to the business world.
"We recognize that it is difficult to accurately predict the cannibalization rate of such a nascent market, but we believe early evidence supports our views,” writes Goldman Sachs analyst Bill Shope, in a report shared on AllThings D about Goldman Sachs' IT spending survey, published Nov. 5.
(You, like us, may think "cannibalization" is used inaccurately, as tablets can only cannibalize other tablets, and Apple sales can only cannibalize other Apple sales, but that's the lingo.)
Shope wrote:
Fifty-one percent of respondents said they expected some degree of notebook cannibalization from tablets. This is an important result because: (1) it’s a corporate survey, and tablets will likely have a more significant impact on the consumer market, and (2) netbooks represent an insignificant component of corporate PC purchases. We suspect December quarter retail data is likely to provide even more interesting tablet cannibalization data points.
It's not only the iPad, although it is mainly the iPad, as it was out on the market first, last spring. There's also Samsung's Galaxy Tab, released this fall, as well as HP's work-oriented Slate; and BlackBerry's PlayBook tablet, due out early next year. And Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is expected to share several Windows tablets, some likely to be business-oriented, at next month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)
Shope is estimating that tablet shipments will be 54.7 million next year, with "with 35 percent PC unit cannibalization," and 79.2 million in 2012, with 33 percent cannibalization, AllThingsD notes. "Overall, he expects 19.1 million notebook units to be lost to tablets in 2011, and 26.1 million to be lost in 2012."
And in a report released Wednesday, ChangeWave Research said its recent survey of 1,641 business IT buyers shows that "while 7 percent of business respondents say their company currently provide employees with tablet devices, an astonishing 14 percent of businesses report their company will be buying tablets in 1st Quarter 2011.
"In other words, the total number of companies making use of tablet devices is set to double in just the next three months — an explosive surge in demand going forward."
The iPad, said ChangeWave, "remains the overwhelming choice of business buyers going forward," even with other tablets becoming available, with 78 percent of respondings saying that's what their companies plan to buy.
"Although the release of the RIM PlayBook isn’t expected until late-1st Quarter 2011, RIM (9 percent) is now tied with Dell (9 percent) for second place in terms of future buying," ChangeWave said, and HP, with 8 percent, is in third place.
Corporate use of iPads has been for Internet access, e-mail, "working away from the office," as well as sales suport and customer presentations, the research firm found.
But using the iPad as a laptop replacement saw the "biggest percentage jump," from 25 percent in August, to 38 percent in November, ChangeWave said.
That's "a trend that has huge implications and which we'll be tracking closely in upcoming ChangeWave surveys," wrote Paul Carton, the firm's vice president of research.
Most tablets are not running on Intel chips, and that's the company that will be most hurt by the tablet surge, contends Goldman Sachs. Apple, for example, uses its own chip, as does Samsung.
Intel is moving to spin the spin on all this, saying that new classes of notebooks and netbooks — like Dell's Inspiron Duo, a kind of "hybrid" netbook/tablet and consumer preferences for keyboards, will keep its Atom-based processor quite popular.
Cannibalization, noted the company in a recent PR pitch, is just not so. "Intel views netbooks, tablets and other computing devices as “additive” to PCs, meaning any one these devices won’t necessarily 'replace' the other. Practically, the netbook can be considered as the in-between product between the tablet and the laptop PC. While not as expensive or heavy as a laptop the netbook sports a fully functional keyboard as opposed to a virtual one to enable precise typing on the go. The average netbook weighs around three pounds, only about a pound more than the tablet, making the netbook easy to take when up and about."
