We’ve all been where Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster was on Monday. Always go with your first answer. After last week predicting Apple would sell 200,000 to 300,000 iPads on Saturday, Munster doubled that original figure to between 600,000 to 700,000. Then came Apple’s official sales count: 300,000.
In a mea culpa of sorts, the analyst told investors his enhanced estimate was based on a faulty belief that 75 percent of sales would come from online pre-orders. The actual percentage was more like 50 percent online.
“The bottom line is that we missed the launch day sales,” Munster said. But predicting the first day sales of a new product is always tricky. Back in 2007, Munster was predicting 500,000 new iPhones would sell — 270,000 of the iconic handset sold on June 29.
Despite the air ball, the analyst stressed “we remain confident in the iPad as an investable theme.” Piper Jaffray did trim its iPad sales expectations for calendar 2010 to 4.3 million, down from 4.3 million. However, this new projection is still higher than Munster’s thinking pre-launch that Apple would sell 2.7 million of the tablet devices this year.
