50% growth at Apple predicted

California: Apple can keep posting sales growth of more than 50% in the next two years as a mobile applications boom fuels demand for devices such as the iPad, said the chief executive of Forrester Research.

George Colony, who founded Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester in 1983, outlined his predictions in an interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York.

Apple sold almost 15 million iPads in its debut year and more than 90 million iPhones in its four-year lifespan.

Demand for the devices has spawned a market for downloadable apps that let users shop, work, play games and handle other tasks on the go.

That in turn keeps customers buying Apple’s products, and puts the company on course for higher revenue than IBM and Hewlett-Packard, Colony said.

“They’ll be bigger than IBM next year, and they’ll be bigger than HP the year after that,” Colony said, citing Apple’s 52% sales growth last year. At current growth rates “they’re going to be a $200 billion (€141bn) revenue company,” he said.