“To quote Björk (back when she was with the Sugarcubes): ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen,'” Sam Grobart reports for Businessweek.
“According to Neil Mawston at Strategy Analytics, Samsung captured almost 95 percent of all Android profits in the first quarter of 2013,” Grobart reports. “It pulled in $5.1 billion, leaving only $200 million for LG, Motorola (which, let’s not forget, is owned by Google), HTC, Sony, Huawei, ZTE, and several others to fight over. Sidenote: If you look at the total smartphone market, across all operating systems, the profit situation is even more dramatic: Apple (AAPL) has 57 percent of all smartphone profits to Samsung’s 41 percent, according to Strategy Analytics. Every other smartphone maker—from Nokia to BlackBerry to Lenovo and so forth—has to divvy up the remaining 2 percent.”
Grobart reports, “This is obviously bad news to any Android maker not named Samsung. It is also troubling news for Google. When Google first started giving away Android to manufacturers, it was counting on a number of equally matched hardware companies to divide the market. No one would get too big, leaving Google in control. These numbers show that this scenario is far from the case.”
Read more in the full article here.