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Apple rollin' in the dough: 75% of cell phone profits

by Steven Sande Feb 3rd 2012 at 2:30PM

The news just keeps getting better for Apple in the mobile phone business. Just yesterday, IDC reported that the company is in third place in terms of worldwide mobile phone sales. Today, Asymco analyst Horace Dediu announced that with a relatively small piece of the pie (IDC said 6 percent of market, Dediu says 8.7 percent), Apple is pulling in a whopping 75 percent of profits in the industry.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt at Apple 2.0 notes in an analysis of Dediu's numbers that out of the top eight manufacturers, only five are showing meaningful profits. Samsung has about a 16 percent profit share, while "Nokia, Research in Motion, and HTC are just scraping by. Motorola, LG and Sony, which bought out Ericsson last month, are still in the red."

As Elmer-DeWitt points out, this is for all mobile phones, not just smartphones. And these numbers are for the worldwide market, not just the United States. He concludes that "This doesn't bode well for the manufacturers who have hitched their wagon to Google's Android or Microsoft's Windows Mobile 7."



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Yaro Kasear

Except the fact that iOS is trailing THIRD in overall mobile OS market share, being beaten out by Symbian and Android. At least the Apple fanboys can take a very small comfort to managing to beat a mobile OS that's always been at the bottom rung since there was a mobile market, a mobile OS that was losing market share to even one of the worst mobile OSen to ever be released.

I question the veracity of this graph, too. The people doing this graph, are they totalling up every Apple phone made and then just comparing the total to single-model sales of other brands, because I find it very hard to believe Apple is outselling Nokia or HTC.

February 05 2012 at 12:26 PM Report abuse -1 rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Yaro Kasear's comment
VanillaSpice

This is a graph of PROFITS not units.

And that little detail completely destroys all the ridiculous assertions you just embarrassed yourself with.

Good day.

February 06 2012 at 7:36 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Yaro Kasear

Except the fact that iOS is trailing THIRD in overall mobile OS market share, being beaten out by Symbian and Android. At least the Apple fanboys can take a very small comfort to managing to beat a mobile OS that's always been at the bottom rung since there was a mobile market (Windows.)

February 05 2012 at 12:24 PM Report abuse -2 rate up rate down Reply
Paolo Sacchetta

serie di epic fail per avere pubblicato una roba del genere le prime! le prime 8 aziende di un mercato non sono la globalità del mercato..aprite un manuale di economia e cercate: concentrazione assoluta e concentrazione relativa di un mercato

February 04 2012 at 11:31 AM Report abuse -1 rate up rate down Reply
Paolo Sacchetta

ripubblico quello che ho commentato a un mio amico in bacheca:
omg sta roba l'ha fatta un bambino di 7 anni..ovviamente le aziende non ti danno i dati sulla composizione del fatturato figuriamoci se ti dicono la percentuale di profitto sul fatturato!sono informazioni decisamente sensibili! questo tipo di analisi richiederebbe una quantità di informazioni paurose su tutte queste grandi aziende! (considera che difficilmente si riescono anche solo a costruire delle curve certe dei prodotti venduti) quindi mi spiace ma un articolo del genere lascia il tempo che trova e una probabile improbabile laurea in economia o scienze politiche....p.s ad occhio nel Q3 2007 apple aveva il 93% del mercato degli smartphone usa e sicuramente ora non guadagna 30000 volte quello che guadagnava allora (due anni fa feci un paper sulla composizione delle revenue di apple negli ultimi 10 anni con strumenti analitici decisamente seri e utilizzando le curve S produssi dati attendibili sui quarter successivi al lancio di iPad 1 quindi non sto parlando per dare aria alla bocca:)

February 04 2012 at 5:23 AM Report abuse -1 rate up rate down Reply
Raj

The graph is originally from Asymco... why doesn't the author attribute appropriately? It's not that hard!

February 03 2012 at 11:54 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
nscheffey

Asymco graph and "announcement" but no link to the post? What up with that?

February 03 2012 at 3:52 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
OctaneNation

At first I thought it was even more impressive that it also applied to 'dumb' phones but the margins on non-smart phones must be much lower.

February 03 2012 at 3:30 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
thePIX

I can predict shaunisdirt's reaction to this story:

$#% SCREW YOU APPLE and SCREW YOU TUAW for reporting such BS!!!

On the other hand I wouldn't want to scare shaunisadirty away being that his comments are always very amusing and worth a chuckle;)

February 03 2012 at 3:26 PM Report abuse -1 rate up rate down Reply
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