“While a report by Strategy Analytics is getting lots of attention, its core implication that Samsung Electronics is now leading Apple in profits is simply not accurate,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider.
“On Friday, Strategy Analytics issued a press release stating that ‘Samsung has finally succeeded in becoming the handset industry’s largest and most profitable vendor,’ according to its ‘latest research,'” Dilger reports. “Strategy Analytics has to employ ‘research’ to come up with this claim because Samsung doesn’t actually report how many phones, smartphones, tablets, cameras or set top boxes it sells (or even the inventory numbers it ships) and doesn’t report the profit share of any of these products segments.”
Dilger reports, “Strategy Analytics estimates that $5.2 billion of the $5.64 billion in operating profits Samsung reported for IM is non-network related, but this ‘mobile’ figure also includes all of Samsung’s Windows PC sales, Chromebooks and Galaxy tablets… Looked at honestly, Apple and the entirety of Samsung Electronics are both making nearly equal amounts of money, but Samsung is relying on much larger volumes of lower quality products to keep up… With Samsung sending out distress signals about the sustainability of its high volume, low quality business model for phones in a market where Apple continues to grow, Strategy Analytics’ creative accounting designed to award Samsung with an contrived achievement appears to be a distraction from reality, rather than real information.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.