With iPad, Apple Will Claim 12 Percent of PC Market in 2011

Some 54.7 million tablets will be sold next year and of those, 37.2 million will be iPads. That’s the forecast from Goldman Sachs’s Bill Shope, who says exploding sales of the device may well make Apple “one of the largest vendors in the global personal computing market”–assuming you define that market as including both PCs and tablets. If you do, expect Apple’s share of the global PC market to nearly triple this fiscal year.

“Apple’s share of the PC market has been below 5 percent for most of the past 15 years, and even with the much-hyped “iPod halo effect,” this level hasn’t changed in recent years,” Shope writes. “With the iPad, however, Apple is now offering a unique computing device that is priced for the mass market. In fact, our Apple forecast assumes that the iPad segment will surpass Apple’s Mac business in revenues and profits by the end of fiscal 2011–the first full year of iPad shipments….If we include tablets in our PC unit forecast, then our estimates suggest Apple’s combined iPad and Mac market share would reach 12 percent in 2011. Based on the current market share breakdown in the PC market, this could presumably make Apple one of the largest vendors in the combined PC and tablet market.”

As Shope concludes, that would represent a profound change in the PC industry’s competitive landscape. Apple’s share of the total PC market currently stands at around 4.4 percent, and that’s the highest it’s been since early 1996. For it to spike to 12 percent in 2011 on the strength of the iPad suggests that the traditional PC vendors need to redouble their tablet efforts to maintain market share.

Oh, one last thing. Shopes’s target on AAPL? $430