04/25/2006, 4:50pm, EDT
Tuesday, April 25th
iPod flourishing, gaining market share
"For a point of reference, there were five Macs in the Top 10 one year ago. We believe that increase is primarily due to the recent launch of the new Intel=based iMac and MacBook Pros."
Munster also noted the steadily increasing internet traffic to Apple's website, indicating a growing interest in the company and its products.
"Apple.com has had a significant increase in 'reach' over the past quarter, which we believe is mainly the result of Apple's new product launches at Macworld on January 10th," Munster told clients in a his research report. "Apple's three-month average traffic rank of 45 on April 20th is the best value that we have observed for apple.com since we've tracked the Alexa data."
Alexa.com is a Web-based information provider that tracks statistics for nearly every main domain name in existence, and is particularly useful for identifying which websites are important to surfers. The "reach" rating signifies the number of users of a site, and Alexa.com expresses this statistic as the number of users per million.
"Apple's 3-month average reach of 13,255,000 on April 20th is the second best value that has been observed (high was on 13,300,000 on March 1st)," the analyst added. "While we realize Web 'traffic rankings' and 'reach' are not perfect measures of actual sales, we believe they are a decent indicator of overall mindshare."
PiperJaffray believes Apple will have shipped more than 85 million iPods by the end of 2006, providing Apple with a greater scope of awareness for various products, or a "halo effect." The company announced in its March quarter conference call that it had shipped 50 million iPods through the end of March 2005.
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Ever been to Creative's web site and looked that their Products page? They have something like 25-30 models. Some of those models come in as many as 10 colors (some outrageously unattractive). So Creative probably has 100 or more distinctive MP3 player "products." And they are lucky to have 10% marketshare on a good day.
Compare that to Apple with almost 80% marketshare but much fewer distinct iPods to fill that 80%. What do they have...? 2 iPods (the big ones), 3 nanos, 2 shuffles. x2 for the iPods and nanos for black and white colors.
(5x2)+2 = 12 I count just 12 distinct iPod products. So while having 10 of 10 spots is impressive sounding, I'm more impressed by Apple's "lean and mean" efficiency these days.