Analyst: Google to sell 2.9M Nexus 7s in Q3, 8M by the end of 2012

Shortly after becoming available in the United States and Canada at various retailers and Google Play in mid-July, we reported Google suspended orders of the 16GB version while reports claimed the company had simply sold out of initial supplies. It would take Google weeks to restock the device, according to reports, but the 16GB model was again available on the store just a week later. Today, we get a look at just how many Nexus 7 tabs Google might have sold with analyst Sameer Singh estimating 6- to- 8 million units sold by the end of 2012 (via ComputerWorld):

Google could sell between six million and eight million of its $199 Nexus 7 tablets by year’s end, according to a new estimate… That’s more than double the three million Google expected to sell by the end of 2012, after putting the device on sale in July and seeing the 16GB version sell-out briefly… The estimate, based on projections using expected shipments of four million touch panels for the Nexus 7 in the third quarter 2012,

Google has not released any sales data related to the device and declined to comment on the estimates. Singh’s estimates definitely blow by the “1.5 million units in five weeks” estimated by Gartner. The estimate of 8 million units by year’s end is also significantly higher than Gartner’s estimates. According to Singh, “Google and Asus may have roughly doubled their [sales] estimates and cranked up the production volume.” Singh explained how he used panel orders to come up with his estimates:

Including the 1.4 million units in July, they have received orders for 4 million panels in Q3 2012. These figures should be equal to the number of Nexus 7 units going into production in each of those months/quarters. We also know that the initial shipment volume delivered to Google was 600,000 units in June…. Using these figures with Little’s Law gives us a cycle time of 2.5 weeks, i.e. it takes 2.5 weeks to produce and deliver a Nexus 7 unit to Google. Since monthly production volume stays at roughly 1-1.5 million units, production capacity is unlikely to be a constraint. Therefore, we can assume a constant cycle time and calculate the total Nexus 7 orders delivered to Google at the end of each month… Once we have the Nexus 7 units available with Google, all we need to do is calculate the initial “sell-through rate” to get an estimate Nexus 7 sales so far.