Raymond James: 30 Million Users Have 'Serious Interest' In Buying An Apple Watch

Tavis McCourt from Raymond James was on CNBC Monday to discuss the outlook for sales of the Apple Inc. AAPL Watch.

Moving The Needle

"When you are running close to $200 billion in revenues, it's hard to move the needle, right?" McCourt asked.

He elaborated, "The watch market today is $30 billion or so. So they have got to not only take some share, but actually grow that market. They have done that in smartphones and tablets before."

Related Link: Apple's 'Spring Forward' Event: A Play-By-Play Recap

"In terms of the interest level, the surveys that we do suggest about 10 percent of iPhone users have serious interest in buying an Apple Watch; that would be about roughly 30 million users and whether all those come out and buy in the first year in its first generation or not we'll see. But in general in terms of sensitivity every 10 million watches as depending on price point, probably somewhere in the $0.25 to $0.40 accretive range on an annual basis."

App Ecosystem Will Determine Sales

McCourt was asked to opine on the recent note from Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi titled ‘Could it [Apple Watch] sell a billion watches?' He replied, "There's a lot of unknowns. A billion would be tough without a significance decrease and I think Apple has shown really that what it wants to do is dominate the high-end of the markets that it is in."

"That's where the vast majority of profits are and I think it brings up a good point though -- a lot of the success of this device as category is not going to be this first year. You look at the iPhone, I forget it exactly, it sold 5 to 10 million in the first four or five quarters. The iPad sold about 10 to 12 million.

"Both these products really required a very robust app ecosystem before they really became mainstream and I suspect that'll be similar with the Apple Watch regardless of what it sells here in the first year," McCourt concluded.