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Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/01/20_million_ipads/

Apple girds loins for 'obscene iPad sales surge'

Foxconn ships '20 million' fondleslabs

By Rik Myslewski in San Francisco

Posted in Media, 1st September 2011 19:10 GMT

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If you need any further proof that the iPad will continue to dominate the tablet market, here's a bit of news that should remove all doubt: Foxconn, the Chinese supplier of Apple's fabulously successful fondleslab, will ship 20 million iPad 2s this quarter.

So says DigiTimes [1] when reporting Foxconn's earnings – $945.9m – for the first half of this year. Foxconn itself declined to comment "on a specific client".

At least one analyst says that during the final quarter of this year – holiday gift-giving season, y'know – Apple will move 21.9 million iPads [2]. How many of those will be produced by Foxconn in the their third, 20-million-iPad quarter is unknown – but no matter how you slice it, Apple is crushing any and all competition.

Just ask HP, which canned its TouchPad [3] two weeks ago. When HP CEO Leo Apotheker explained the demise of his company's tablet effort and the spin-off their PC business, he said "The tablet effect is real." What he really meant was "The iPad effect is real, and it's kicking us in both cheeks: our tablets and our consumer PCs."

The Motorola Xoom? A mere 250,000 were shipped in its first quarter of availability, and 440,000 in the most recent quarter [4]. RIM's PlayBook? "Approximately 500,000 [5]".

And remember, those numbers are of tablets shipped to retailers, and not how many were sold to actual cash-on-the-barrelhead customers – all indications are that the latter stat is significantly lower. Apple, on the other hand, has been selling iPads as fast as it can make them – the company has regularly had to explain to its investors that it's building them as fast as it can.

As we've said before [6], people don't want tablets. They want iPads.

As of Apple's last fiscal quarter, which ended in June, 28.7 million iPads had flown off the shelves in the year and a quarter that they had been on sale. And if history is any guide, we're going to see another iPad sales surge: during the holiday quarter of 2010, Apple sold 7.3 million iPads, a nearly 75 per cent bump up from 2010's third calendar quarter sales of 4.2 million.

Now, we're not saying that this holiday quarter will see an equally ludicrous leap – after all, in 2010 the iPad was rampaging through early adopters like a voracious virus – but just for giggles, let's say that those 20 million Foxconn iPads get sold this quarter, and that the 2010 holiday-buying bump-up repeats itself: that'd mean that 35 million iPads would be found under Christmas trees, Hanukkah bushes, and Kwanzaa candles this year.

Ain't gonna happen, of course – but 21.9 million? Sounds doable.

Acer chairman J.T. Wang says [7] that tablet "fever" is cooling. Well, he's right, but only because it was so steamy last year. The company's founder, Stan Shin, dismisses [8] tablets as a "fad".

He's wrong. And if DigiTimes' sources are correct, Foxconn can show him 20 million reasons why. ®