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Tablets: Much Bigger Than You Think, Says Morgan Stanley
Posted by Tiernan Ray
This is a new one on me, folks — a “blue paper” is what Morgan Stanley calls its 96-page report today on the prospects for tablet computing, authored by numerous analysts, including Kathryn Huberty, Mark Lipacis, Adam Holt and Ehud Gelblum.

The big picture: people don’t appreciate how big tablet computing can get, write the authors. They project shipments of more than 100 million by 2012. (To put that in perspective, analysts have been projecting Apple (AAPL) may ship between 30 and 40 million units of its iPad this year, and the entire industry may ship 50 million, according to several published estimates I’ve seen.)

The team did multiple surveys that they say canvased 8,000 consumers and 50 corporate CIOs. The findings show, they write, that tablets are set to be taken up by two thirds of corporations in 2011, either through direct purchase or allowing employees to take up the machines personally within the firewall. And the writers were “surprised,” they note, by what the data said about International demand: “While consensus views the tablet market as largely a U.S. consumer phenomenon, the international consumer survey data surprised us.”

Demand in major developed economies, phrased in the survey as “extreme interest in purchasing a tablet in the next 12 months, was higher than in the U.S., with only 11% of U.S. respondents surveyed saying yes, but 15% in France, 16% in Japan, 18% in Germany, 20% in the U.K., and a whopping 41% in China. And the overall international demand was 21%.