Apple earns almost 30% more this year and Samsung sinks since 2012.
This is what emerges from the figures indicated in the Wall Street Journal report: Apple monopolizes a 92% of the benefits of the market (from 65% of the previous year) selling only the twenty% of phones worldwide. These figures have been taken contrasting a market in which, on the other hand, most manufacturers have no profits and even in most cases, losses.
In other words, you have to read the figures carefully: that 92% profit (share) is in relation to a market in which the profits are practically kept by them and Samsung, which reaches 15% (remember that we are talking about the comparison between all the companies in the sector worldwide), with which between the two they exceed all the others in benefits. These figures must be taken into perspective: in 2012, both companies shared a 50/50 of profits, more or less when Samsung’s problems in the sale of smartphones began and the beginning of the chain of quarterly losses that have reached up to the present moment. Naturally, we cannot forget that Nokia came to have two thirds of the market for her alone. Sometimes history hurts…
These data can have a fairly wide number of different interpretations. Apple is being able to sell very large numbers of phones at over $600 a unit on average, while the average Android phone is 185 dollars about. Naturally, many more Androids are sold than iPhones, but what is revealed in this study is that manufacturers generally do not directly make or lose money by selling their handsets. The causes of this apparent conflict between price and sales are very diverse, but we cannot forget that it is a rather curious phenomenon that did not occur before the smartphone: Nokia had a very well-established business in which it shared its system with other companies and they all had reasonable profits (apart from there being a significantly smaller number of companies since the Chinese had not yet emerged as technological manufacturers).
Now everything is totally different, since on the one hand we have a brutal polarization between Apple and Google, which does not allow anyone else to enter (for the moment at least) in a tremendously saturated market. On the other, Android has generated a dynamic that means that if you don’t sell cheaper than the one who sells the cheapest, you don’t sell, and that means making losses. Even the Chinese, who have a captive market where they get benefits (remember that the report is worldwide), have serious problems getting out of it (more than likely reason why they practically do not leave China). And if we add to that the Chinese themselves, who have saturated the market with incredibly cheap terminals, we arrive at a scenario in which Samsung is having serious problems to maintain the type, being the only ones that are maintaining it at the moment.
None of us are fortune tellers and we don’t know what will happen in the medium or long term. But this seems to break somewhere, and at the moment it doesn’t seem like it will break on Apple’s side. Android is at a crossroads in which, being the most widely used system in the world (as Nokia was not so long ago), it is also the one that gives the least benefits, and this may mean a massive abandonment by many manufacturers who may be waiting Like rain in May, the appearance of a new system like FirefoxOS (which never arrives) or some other of the same type. However, this is not a guarantee of anything, since they can fall into the same destructive dynamics, and without an operating system supported by a strong company like Microsoft (which still hasn’t let go), the situation is precarious to say the least. In a while, the crash that can happen in this market can be so important that it generates a crisis in itself, at least in the sector, whose bubble is so swollen that it is possible that anyone can exploit it. Eye: that’s not necessarily in Apple’s interest.
(And it is not to add more fuel to the fallen tree, but this ZDNet article exemplifies some reasons for Samsung’s drift with its latest phone. And it is not that ZDNet is exactly a pro-Apple medium…).
Via: MacRumors
