If it sometimes feels as if everyone and her grandmother are hawking a tablet device, you aren’t too far off. By the second-half of 2011 there is a “high risk of facing excess tablet PC inventory,” one industry publication writes Wednesday. The report claims “demand scale” is only for 20 million units.
Analysts already predict Apple will sell anywhere between 18 million and 48 million iPads this year, with 23 million units in 2012. The overall tablet market could reach 55.7 million units in 2011.
The key to this ‘tablet glut‘ is the entry of second-string tech companies into the tablet fray now occupied by Apple, HP, RIM and other top players. Today’s report from DigiTimes harkens back to an earlier one in late 2010. The publication, quoting suppliers, warned of a “sharp drop in demand as soon as the third quarter of 2011.”
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.
