SanDisk rivals iPod: NPD
p2p news / p2pnet:- This morning we had an email from MP3NewsWire’s Ritch Menta pointing us to a new post slugged SanDisk is Number 2 in MP3 Player Sales?
It’s interesting for a couple of reasons. It quotes USA Today as saying, "Apple has 74% of the digital music device market, according to researcher The NPD Group. Closest rival SanDisk has just 6.4%."
But, “SanDisk is number two?” – asks Menta incredulously. “Did I miss something? Asleep…no coma, is a better word. Right next to the article is a graph showing Apple and SanDisk followed by Creative, with 3.9%, iRiver with 3.6% and Samsung with 2.6%. The online version of the article does not contain the graph, created by the paper’s own Marcy E. Mullins from information supplied by NPD Group for its July measurements. I went to the NPD Group site to see if they had a similar graph. They did, for both the June and July measurements, and they are on the right.”
Menta says SanDisk has been serving the mp3 player market with flash memory since the Eiger MPman first appeared in 1998, but they’ve, “only been producing players for a short period of time and that “SanDisk, of course, doesn’t sell a hard drive-based unit, which means their line of portable players is more limited than that of Toshiba and Sony.
“Yet somehow SanDisk is the second largest manufacturer of MP3 portables. Furthermore, comparing the NPD Group’s June and July graphs one finds that SandDisk doubled its market share in a month from 3.1% in June to 6.2% in July. SanDisk hitting the number 5 spot in June is a story in itself. Doubling sales in 30 days against the efforts of iRiver, Creative Labs, and Samsung is a headliner.”
This means SanDisk is making ground on Apple in a way no one else has been able to, says Menta.
“But is it true or is it just statistical deviation (suggesting that the NPD Group’s sample pool is either too small or too regional)? Maybe, but SanDisk still had to sell enough players to even be considered for the list. The previously mentioned Sony and Toshiba are not on the list despite the fact they are much more visible in retail stores (though the SanDisk products are visible nationally in Radio Shack stores). How about RCA and Philips, two brands you can find at the local Target store? What about Archos and Dell? Rio is also not on the list, but the company pulled the plug for a reason.”
“If it is true good for SanDisk, but I still have my doubts," Menta adds. "I think I will follow up with a couple of my other sources and see if I can confirm this.”
Out of nowhere
We’ll be interested to learn what they have to say, Rich. We’ve been interested in NPD ‘reports’ for quite a while, since 2003, in fact.
It’s the same outfit that touted iTunes as a “formidable competitor against free peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing services" and which put iTunes together with LimeWire as the second-most-popular digital music service in March, 2005.
Both claims are, of course, completely ridiculous. And the company has also come out with other similary interesting reports.
When we first came across NPD, it had suddenly appeared out of nowhere with ‘studies’ and ‘reports’ bolstering entertainment cartel party lines.
We emailed NPD wondering how many years’ experience it had in the music research field and asked about the team of interviewers/statisticians we thought it must boast given the nature and number of its outpourings.
We never did hear back, and when, back then, we visited the NPD site, we weren’t able to find a single music, or other entertainment industry client. Rather, its customer base listed adidas International, International Flavors & Fragrance and Wrigley, among others.
Stay tuned.
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September 26th, 2005 at 5:18 pm
A little web historical research revealed that the NPD Group became music industry experts around Aug 11, 2004.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.npd.com
Wow !