Tue Nov 27, 2012 10:25 pm
My own guesses at production/sales:
From the supply side: In one of Grant Petty's early "updates", he alluded to a warehouse full of $20 million in parts. If I assume that the cost of these parts (I'm not counting sensors and I'm assuming that $20 refers to cost, not potential revenue) to BMD is about $500, then I would estimate their short-term capacity (read orders or projected orders) to be around 40,000 units. The $500 cost takes into account that R&D, sensor, assembly, etc. are unaccounted for. Obviously, this is pure speculation on their cost structure. But, I doubt I am off by much more than a factor of 2 in either direction. Therefore, I would guess that short-term (one to two calendar quarters) production capacity is in the 20,000 to 80,000 range.
From the demand side: A forum member here recently quoted a B&H rep indicating that they had about 800 pre-orders (and no, I don't take this as fact, but...). Assuming that B&H has about 20% of the US pre-orders (again, probably off, but probably not by more than a factor of 2), then this estimates the U.S. pre-orders to be about 4,000 (or in the 2,000 to 8,000 range). If the U.S. represents about 25% of the global market (based on Canon revenue), this puts global demand/pre-orders at around 16,000 (or in the 8,000 to 32,000 range).
Putting supply and demand together (can't help it, I'm an economist), 20,000-30,000 units seems reasonable and I would expect them to have the capacity to fulfill this quantity in fairly short order.
Of course, this all rests on the assumption of any production at all, for which we have little indication.