Analyst estimates of sales are quite varied.
The Street is offering more and more estimates these days for Facebook’s (FB) potential revenue from virtual reality.
In the last month or so, as we approached the first shipments of the company’s Oculus Rift headset, a week ago, analysts began fine-tuning how much they think Facebook will sell of the headset, and how much it may make.
Herewith a sampling of the estimates from lowest to highest number of unit shipments:
Gene Munster, Piper Jaffray: “We believe Oculus could sell ~500k units in 2016 at $599 each.”
Axiom’s Victor Anthony: “For now we are assuming a conservative sales estimate of 500K headsets at $599 for sales of $300M this year, and one million unit sales in 2017.
Youssef Squali, Cantor Fitzgerald: “We believe Facebook’s Oculus Rift could sell 600K+ units in 2016 and 2M+ in 2017, generating over $1.6B of revenue in 2017.”
Ken Sena, Evercore ISI: “In terms of our Rift forecast specifically, we see FB initially capturing 85% share of our industry desktop hardware forecast this year of $670mm, which wears away to 40% over five years as more competition enters the market. This implies the company will ship 950k units in 2016, growing to as many as 12mm over 5 years, while ASPs drop from $600 to ~$250 over the same period.”
Ross Sandler, Deutsche Bank: “We forecast Oculus to sell 1m units for 2016, trailing PSVR, but off to a strong debut.”
James Cakmak, Monness, Crespi & Hardt: “We estimate Facebook can deliver 2MM units this year. While this is an optimistic figure, it’s not that far of a reach, by our measure [...] In total, we project about $1.2B from the Rift in 2016 and $100MM – $300MM from games based on accounting treatment.”