How does the Trefis price take into account a companys emerging business lines or new products?
Accounting for emerging business lines or new products is at the discretion of the Trefis team for each company. The decision whether or not to incorporate a potentially new business line is typically based on the perceived uncertainty around the existence or growth of that business line as well as the availability of reliable information to justify Trefis forecasts. In some cases, forecasts of new products are incorporated into forecasts of existing products. For example, within our analysis for Dell we factored in a faster decline for our Notebook Pricing forecast based on the emergence of Netbooks (a new class of low-cost notebooks). In other instances, we have deliberately chosen not to incorporate or estimate speculated new products due to the high level of uncertainty. For example, could Microsoft enter the mobile phone market to counter Apple (iPhone) as well as Google (mobile search)? It’s certainly an option for Microsoft but based on the information available to use we cannot
