I'm really skeptical over those projections from SIA. I'd sure like to know what their assumptions are. In fact, I'm skeptical of any projections that do not include a basis.
My own projections, which may or may not be better than those of an industry association, is based on growth in the individual applications - cameras, MP3 players, cell phones, and palm computers or similar devices. Taking all these into consideration, and forgetting for the moment the varying amounts of memory in each unit shipped, I'd say the overall growth in shipments will be at least 100 percent, year to year, for the next three or possibly four years. If you assume that the price of each unit of a given capacity will drop, based on competition, productivity improvements, etc., then the dollar value of shipments might increase over that period by only 60 to 70 percent, year to year. But overall, I can't see why SIA is projecting so much lower.
Also, I'm not including PIC - the personal information carrier being developed with Kaneb for the Army. If I included that and made an assumption about every man, woman and child eventually carrying a "dog tag" with essential medical information, the projections would be much, much higher. |
