Does IDC Really Think People Will Buy Over 225 Million AR/VR Devices By 2020?

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Does IDC Really Think People Will Buy Over 225 Million AR/VR Devices By 2020?

It sure seems so, based on the venerable analyst firm's most recent report:

[W]orldwide revenues for the augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) market will grow from $5.2 billion in 2016 to more than $162 billion in 2020... Sales of AR/VR hardware will generate more than 50% of worldwide revenues throughout the forecast period.

This $162 billion figure has been widely reported everywhere, but as with the Bloomberg/Business Intelligence report, no one I know has run the back-of-envelope calculations on this figure. But since IDC's report says over half this $162B revenue is from hardware devices, that's $81 billion. And if we divide that by $350 per individual device sale at retail -- averaging the price of premium devices like Vive and low end smartphone add-ons -- we get well over 225 million. (And that's estimating downward.)

I've asked the report's lead author, Christopher Chute, if my assumption is correct, because 225 million devices sold in such a short time is a massive market:

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iPhone adoption chart via Statisa

For a couple comparison points, only one videogame console, the Playstation 2, has anywhere near that install base, and that took over a decade, while the latest videogame consoles, the PS4 and Xbox One, have moved less than 100 million total in the last 3 years.

A couple more points: It took the iPhone over 8 years to exceed 225M in sales, and that's, you know, a fricking phone. And right now, in 2016, if we're to include Google Cardboard's 5 million, and Samsung Gear's ~1 million, and 10 million China-made smartphone add-ons, and the under 1 million sales of both Vive and Oculus Rift, we're well under 20 million total so far. So we're talking 10x growth in under 5 years. Which I guess is possible, but when people start talking about adoption rates comparable with the iPhone, I'd say it's time to start scrutinizing these estimates much closer.

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