In the global mobile phone market, “units are up 7% with smartphones up 47%. Revenues are up 20% and overall profits are up 52%. This are exceptionally strong numbers. Few industries can measure growth in double digits,” Horace Dediu reports for Asymco. “So if the industry is booming but the majority of participants in the industry are loss making (and surprisingly so) then what is going on? There are two answers: new market disruption and low end disruption.”
“The new market disruption is the migration of a large number of demanding customers away from phones-as-voice-products to phones-as-computing-products,” Dediu reports. “The low-end disruption is the migration of a large number of less demanding customers from branded phones to unbranded, commodity phones.”
Dediu reports, “Here is the profit picture: Of the vendors tracked (public companies who report mobile phone divisional performance), Apple obtained 73% of operating profits, Samsung 26% and HTC 1%.”
Much more, including the usual excellent graphs, in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Boom!
We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in. – Former Palm CEO Ed Colligan, November 16, 2006
Related articles:
The decline of Android foretells the rise of a total Apple monopoly – April 27, 2012
Apple’s iPhone alone now the most profitable business on the planet; makes more money than ExxonMobil – April 25, 2012
Report: 6 of top 10 enterprise devices using Good Technology are iOS, 97% of tablets are iPad – April 26, 2012
Google’s Android on the decline as Apple iPhone takes 59% share of U.S. top three carriers – April 25, 2012
Apple now selling 645,000 iOS and OS X devices per day – April 25, 2012
Apple bulldozes Street with blowout $39.2 billion revenue; shares rocket in after-hours trading – April 24, 2012
78% of all smartphones sold by AT&T last quarter were Apple iPhones – April 24, 2012
Google’s Android is losing momentum – March 29, 2012
Nielsen: Apple’s U.S. iPhone market share surges as Android stalls – March 29, 2012
Apple’s thermonuclear war on Android – March 29, 2012
2011 best-selling smartphones in USA: Apple iPhone models take top 3 spots – February 23, 2012
Aftershocks from Android market share dive rumble through mobile market – January 31, 2012
ABI: Apple iPhone tops smartphone market as Android suffers its first decline in share – January 27, 2012
Apple overtakes Samsung to take world’s largest smartphone vendor crown – January 27, 2012
These charts will make the Fandroids want to puke – January 26, 2012
AT&T sold 7.6 million iPhones and fewer than 1.8 million Android phones in Q411 – January 26, 2012
Apple’s iOS passes Google’s Android to take U.S. smartphone market share crown – January 25, 2012
Analyst: Verizon’s record iPhone sales signal waning demand for Google Android phones – January 24, 2012
Developers are essential to the life force of any tech eco-system. They’ll usually follow the money trail. Seems Google ought to be concerned about the table scraps coming their way.
And in related FUD…came across this 2007 Bloomberg piece this AM about the new iPhone via John Gruber – http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aRelVKWbMAv0.
The link in MDN’s Take leads back to that story, and the very first comment that day was hilarious in context:
jon1
Monday, November 20, 2006 – 11:31 am · Reply
Doesn’t it make you want to fast-forward time?
I love my Treo but I can’t stand arrogance. I may not immediately get an iPhone but really hope it is great. I’d love to see this guy eat his words.
“There’s an old saying – stick to your knitting – and Apple is not a mobile phone manufacturer, that’s not their knitting.”
~ Telstra Operations Chief Greg Winn, 1997.
Fool!