Piper Jaffray Mint Announces Apple App Store $1.2 Billion Commemorative Coin

To hear tell from Steve Jobs, Apple (AAPL) doesn’t think its new App Store will make a material contribution to its bottom line. ” …To be clear, we don’t intend to make money off the App Store,” Jobs said at a town-hall meeting earlier this year announcing the store. “We’re basically giving all the money to the developers, and the 30% that pays for running the store, that’ll be great.”

Course, it will be greater still if it adds a few percentage points to Apple’s operating income. And according to Piper Jaffray (PJC) analyst Gene Munster, it will. Between one and three percentage points, specifically. And if it ends up being on the high end of that projection, the App Store could end up generating $1.21 billion in revenues (see chart below).

Now, to be clear, that particular forecast assumes an installed base of 80.8 million active App Store users (iPhone and iPod Touch combined) spending a minimum of $15. A bit optimistic? Perhaps. Certainly, a market of 61.6 million iPhone users by the end of 2009, as the chart below suggests, does seem a bit aggressive. That said, Apple’s sold 6 million of the device’s first iteration in just under a year. And it was peddling them in just six countries.

By the end of 2009, it will be selling them in 70. And at half their original price. So maybe 61.6 million iPhone users and $1.21 billion in App Store revenues is a stretch. And maybe it isn’t.