In less than two months the Apple Watch will finally be released. It was announced late last year and the company had said it would start shipping units in early 2015. Recently CEO Tim Cook revealed that shipments will begin in April. This is a truly “new” product that Apple has brought to the market after a couple of years so there’s no previous benchmark to suggest how it will perform, but a J.P. Morgan analyst estimates that Apple will be able to sell 26 million units of its smartwatch throughout calendar 2015.
J.P. Morgan analyst Rod Hall estimates that by the end of the March quarter there will be 400 million potential customers for the Apple Watch since it requires an iPhone to function and is only compatible with iPhone 5 or newer models.
Hall’s forecast suggests that Apple Watch will make its way to the wrists of 5 percent of compatible iPhone owners before this year is over.
He then predicts 39 percent margins for Apple on the presumption that 95 percent of sales will be accounted for by the $349 Apple Watch Sport models.
The company is also going to sell more expensive Apple Watch Edition models, which tout 18K gold, and are expected to cost a few thousand dollars apiece.
Hype for Apple’s new product is through the roof already and people really want to see the company’s take on the smartwatch. Numbers that come in at the end of this year will really show what sort of an impact the Apple Watch had on customers.
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