It shows that for a number of years—from 2009 until late 2012—Apple’s users were valued (implicitly by the stock market) as likely to create a net present value of about $1200 in earnings. The current value is about a third of that, or $440 in earnings.
via What’s an Apple user worth? | asymco.
Continues:
Although the rate of spending of each customer is decreasing, the number of new customers is increasing more rapidly. As this is happening the company’s equity is being priced such that an Apple user is considered less than half as valuable as she used to be—from 3.2x revenues to 1.5x revenues.
What’s surprising is that this is the product lifecycle trend you see when a product goes from the enthusiast to mainstream market. Well, one can ask, aren’t iPhones already mainstream? It may seem like that in the US today but in the broader global market, the definition of mainstream is very different.
I very much believe that this market will follow the traditional pattern of product lifecycles and the durations will be a lot more compressed that for other tech products. In other words, iOS’ reign will be shorter (measured in years) than Windows reign on desktop.
#productlifecycle