Industry Forecasting

Industry Forecasting

BUS 620

Dr. Gilliard

December 19th, 2011

Industry Forecasting

When preparing a forecast of a market, the size of the market must first be estimated or evaluated. The size of the potential market contains “the likely demand from all actual and potential buyers of a product or product class (Mullins, J. and Walker, Jr., O. C., 2010).” If there is already a market for the product investors will want to know the size of this market also. These two aspects make up the target market and create a sales forecast of what the revenues will be for approximately five years. A current rising market is the mobile device industry, particularly the market for tablet devices, such as the iPad. Major trends that will affect the mobile device industry over the next five years including post PC era, newly created market, cloud storage, business world, and paperless initiatives. There are many ways these anticipated trends will impact the successful marketing of the products like drive of creation of other products, drive quality, and creation of connectivity throughout consumers.

Product

Over the past couple of years the mobile device industry has exploded with the creation of the tablet market. Apple created this market with the creation of the iPad. Steve Jobs explains in an interview with Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal “we’ve reached the beginning of the post-PC era, even though PC’s have taken us a long way (Mossberg, 2010).” This post-PC era is the move away from big bulky desktops and workstations to portable wireless devices.

Trends

The most important trend affecting the tablet market is the reaching of the post PC era. This is the time when the demand for desktop PCs are diminishing and the shift to media consumption is rising. Consumers want the mobility of photos, music, documents or anything that can be found on a desktop computer. With the creation of cloud storage mobility has become even more mobile. Large amounts of...