Expect shortages of new iPad, say analysts

Computerworld - Apple will not be able to meet demand for the new iPad when it goes on sale later this month, analysts have said.

The company will host an event in San Francisco Wednesday morning, by all signs the launch of its next tablet. According to reports today, Apple will begin selling the new model on March 16.

But as with the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4S last year, experts expect that supply will be out of sync with demand for at least several months after the tablet hits stores.

"They'll face a shortage for a while," said Ezra Gottheil of Technology Business Research today.

"Supplies of the iPad 3 will be tight," agreed Rhoda Alexander, the lead tablet analyst at IHS iSuppli, in an interview last month. "It will be a repeat of 2011."

Last year, Apple admitted its suppliers could not assemble iPad 2 tablets fast enough to meet demand. Four months after the iPad 2's introduction Apple executives said that they were still short of inventory.

"[Although] some SKUs and some countries are at a supply-demand balance, we're still working very hard on the balance of the world," acknowledged Tim Cook, then the chief operating officer and now Apple's CEO, in a July 19, 2011, earnings call with Wall Street analysts.

During the same call, Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's chief financial officer, said iPad inventories remained "well below" the company's target.

It wasn't until part-way through 2011's July-September quarter that iPad supplies met demand, Cook said in a similar earning conference call last October.

Alexander thought that the new iPad would suffer the same fate for five to six months after its introduction, or slightly longer than last year. She attributed the longer stretch to the fact that she -- and other analysts -- expect the company to continue selling the iPad 2 alongside the new device, consuming its share of a finite production capacity.

Both Gottheil and Alexander cited the anticipated higher-resolution screen of the iPad 3 as a major reason for the bottleneck. "Even though it seems now that Apple has had that HD screen in the works for some time -- I think that was behind its huge pre-purchases [last year] -- they still come out at a certain number per minute or hour or day," said Gottheil.