Wednesday’s Apple announcement, widely expected to include an updated version of the Cupertino, Calif. company’s wildly-popular iPad tablet, will be “crucial” for the tech giant to maintain its lead against rival products, one analyst said Tuesday.
“We believe Apple must make a convincing case for why the iPad 2 is better than the plethora of competitors coming to market, while at the same time persuading iPad 1 buyers to upgrade to iPad 2,” Ticonderoga Securities’ analyst Brian White told investors in a note. Why the importance? The tablet provided 17.2 percent of the company’s revenue during the first quarter of 2011 – and the figure is rising.
According to White, the iPad “will contribute nearly one-third of Apple’s $36.8 billion in incremental revenue that we are modeling” for fiscal 2011. If you remove the iPad revenue, Apple’s fiscal 2011 revenue would grow 41 percent compared to 56 percent, the analyst adds.
In addition, analysts will watch the Wednesday event to discover how the Apple product announcement is received without the perfunctory appearance of CEO Steve Jobs, out on medical leave. The question will be how Chief Operating Office Tim Cook conducts himself in the role – and whether he will wear black jeans and turtle-neck.
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.
