Morgan Stanley estimates 8 million iPhones will be sold in one year.

An article on MacNN.com said that Morgan Stanley estimates over 8 million iPhones will be sold based on current trends and a survey which shows that about 19% of the market wants to buy a converged device and about 23% are at least somewhat interested in buying an iPhone. Here is my post on MacNN.com going through the numbers.

These are investment analysts that are trying to predict the market for the iPhone. It is not going to be an exact science. Let's look at the numbers and try to make some reasonable conclusions.

Article numbers:
140 mil - Number of "converged" devices sold in past 2 years.
7 mil - Number of "converged" devices sold by Blackberry
19% - Percent of people who own/want conv device.
23% - Percent of people who are extremely/somewhat interested in buying an iPhone

Conclusions:
The percentage of people who currently own a conv device has to be less than 19% since this includes "want" to buy also. Lets say it is 15% now. Since the current market for converged phones is 140 mil over 2 years lets say it is half that in one year. So the current market of converged phones is 70 million in one year. So the total market per year for cell phones is (70/.15) = 467 million. If only about 10% of the people who say they are interested in the iPhone actually buy one then that would be (23%*0.10) = 2.3%. That is 2.3% of the total market not just the converged market. This would mean that Apple could sell about (0.023*467) = 10.7 million iPhones in one year. This is 2.3 times more than the goal Apple is shooting for. So Morgan Stanley is being more conservative than my estimates. Then there is the potential ace in the hole. Apple already has about 23% of the market at least somewhat interested in buying an iPhone. This can only grow more when the iPhone is heavily advertised and all of your friends have one to show off. In reality, no one can know how big the market is going to be for the iPhone but it is potentially very very big.