Booming Digital Audio Player Market Tops $4.5 Billion

global

In-Stat : The exploding market for both hard disk drive and Flash-based portable audio players is expected to reach over 104 million units by 2009, up from 27.8 million units in 2004. Drivers for this booming market include falling prices, the availability of legitimate subscription and pay-per-download online music sites, smaller hard disk drives, and increasing Flash memory capacities. As competition heats up, vendors are striving to differentiate products by offering a wide range of price points, memory capacities, and features. As a result, we are seeing increased segmentation. For example, the hard disk drive (HDD) digital audio player segment can be sub-divided into two categories: the 1-inch or smaller segment and the 1.8-inch segment.

• Revenue for both HDD and Flash-based MP3 players reached approximately $4.5 billion, a remarkable increase of almost 200% over 2003.

• Apple is the leader in worldwide portable audio players with 30.2% of the combined HDD and Flash-based portable audio player market.

• Other leading vendors include Rio, iRiver and Creative.

• 1GB capacity or greater Flash MP3 players will represent just over 20% of all Flash-based MP3 player shipments worldwide by the end of this year.

• Consumer survey data shows that the percentage of US respondents owning a digital audio player has increased from 16% in 2001 to 25% in 2005.

Portable Digital Audio Players: Moving to the Beat of a Booming Market Publ 20050621