Apple Took 92% Of Smartphone Industry Profits In Q4 (not really) – IBD (Feb 7, 2017)

Every quarter, there’s a slew of headlines on this basis, usually based on analysis from Cannacord Genuity. The big flaw in this analysis (and the reason I inserted a “not really” into the headline) is that it only looks at those players that publicly report profits from a smartphone unit, plus Apple. As the article points out, the “survey” of six “major” smartphone vendors includes the #1 and #2 but also BlackBerry and Microsoft, which each shipped well under a million smartphones last quarter. It entirely leaves out the third, fourth, and fifth largest smartphone vendors (Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo) and other big names from the top 10 like Lenovo and Xiaomi. Lenovo is publicly traded, but hasn’t reported yet (and is likely to have been unprofitable in smartphones again), but no-one really knows how profitable the others are. So the headline is misleading when it talks about “industry profits” – it’s a very narrow analysis of six vendors, only two of which are in the top 10. Now, that’s not to say that it isn’t likely that Apple captured the vast majority of profits in the smartphone market yet again – it almost certainly did, and this situation highlights both the general challenges with driving meaningful profits from consumer electronics and the specific challenges associated with competing on the basis of Android in smartphones. But this – as with the flawed quarterly market share rankings with their false precision – grates every quarter because it’s shoddy analysis.

via IBD

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• Apple
• Samsung

• Profits
• Smartphones

• Android is Hard
• Hardware is Hard

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