How Apple Will Sell 50 Million iPhones
There are two kinds of investment analysts: the kind no one listens to–who say crazy things just to get noticed–and the kind who say smart things that everybody ought to hear.
Bernstein Research’s Toni Sacconaghi is definitely in the latter category. So when Sacconaghi wrote something pretty startling Monday: that Apple ( AAPL – news – people ) could sell 50 million iPhones in 2011–up from precisely squat in 2006–it means that Steve Jobs and company are going to sell 50 million iPhones sometime real soon.
Here’s how:
–The smart phone market is growing fast, and Apple can keep up.
The market has grown 35% a year over the past three years, making projections it will grow 27% in both 2010 and 2011 seem reasonable. "If Apple simply grows with the market, it would ship an incremental 10.3 million units in FY 2011 vs. FY 2009 levels," Sacconaghi wrote.
