Apple may have sold as many as two million fewer iPads than expected this holiday season, and Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet may be to blame.
Morgan Keegan analyst Tavis McCourt pruned his forecast for Apple’s fiscal first quarter today, saying that while iPad sales for the period did exceed those of the previous quarter, he believes they fell well short of his estimates.
McCourt had been looking for iPad shipments of 16 million. Now he thinks that they’ll top out at 13 million, and that a portion of that shortfall is due to the Fire. “Based on data from Amazon, we believe the Amazon Fire likely sold 4-5 million units this holiday season, which probably means maybe 1-2 million cannibalized iPad sales at most,” McCourt wrote in a note to clients.