iPad 2 Shipments Jump to 20M Just in Time for Holiday Sales
Timing is everything. That could be the message from news Apple’s chief iPad 2 supplier is expected to churn out 20 million of the tablets for the third quarter – just in time for the all-important holiday sales period. Shipments of the iPad 2 for the quarter were already expected to hit 14 million, thus topping the last period’s 9.25 million tablets Apple sold.
The jump in shipping by Foxconn marks a “42.8 percent increase” from the company’s July projection, reports Taiwan Economic News. The supplier’s parent, Hon Hai “stressed that it is normal to forecast a shipment surge in the third quarter, a booming season for the electronic industry.”
But here’s another incident where the importance of timing can be critical. LG Display, which makes the LCD displays for the iPad 2, have just solved a quality control problem that had essentially cut production numbers in half. The company was able to ship 4 million iPad 2 displays in August after a July where production slacked off to about 2.5 or 2.6 million 9.7-inch displays, DigiTimes reported Friday.
Earlier this week, Pacific Crest analyst Andy Hargreaves forecast Apple would ship 16.5 million iPads during this quarter, a 49 percent increase over previous estimates. JP Morgan’s Mark Moskowitz seemed to echo that positive outlook, telling investors “Beyond the iPad, there has not been another high-volume tablet offering, yet.”
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
