“Every quarter, the tech world’s market research firms release metrics on how many PCs, phones and tablets Apple reported selling and compare these to estimates of what the rest of the world produced, resulting in headlines that minimize the importance of the world’s largest and most profitable company,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider. “You might wonder why.”
“Strategy Analytics has offered some unusual transparency regarding its motive for carving out a very specific market and then stuffing the pie chart with ‘tier two’ volume to the point where the world’s best selling tablet is crushed down into an embarrassing statistical sliver of shrinking ‘share,'” Dilger writes. “As Strategy Analytics notes, “we support our clients with a variety of high-stakes projects, including: new product development and product roadmaps; driving existing products down the cost curve; bundled pricing strategies; infrastructure investment and optimization; new market penetration and market expansion; influencing consumer behavior and buying preferences, and many more short- and long-term initiatives.””
“How exactly does reporting facts on sales result in ‘influencing consumer behavior and buying preferences”? Hypothetically, if one could fool the world’s journalists into parroting off statistics that portrayed the most successful vendor of tablets as being in desperate straits and ‘failing’ in a matter of speaking, it would sure take the pressure off of those who are failing to actually sell tablets, wouldn’t it?” Dilger writes. “‘Influencing consumer behavior and buying preferences’ would require creating a composite of competing companies, pooling their sales together under the communal identifying ingredient of ‘Android,’ and possibly erasing the boundary between premium phones and stuff that can barely function beyond making a basic phone call.”
“Add up all this stuff and you could create the impression that the rest of the world is winning with 81 percent of somethingorother, distracting away from the fact that Apple is destroying its competition in both phones and tablets in the only market segments that a vendor with the luxury of being choosy would choose to do business in,” Dilger writes. “I’m sure nobody will catch on.”
Tons more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: This isn’t the first time someone’e questioned these unit share reports, but it’s one of the best.
Bravo to Canalys for having the balls to tell it like it is. Here’s to IDC, Gartner and the rest each growing a pair sooner than later, too. – MacDailyNews Take, “Canalys unafraid to count iPad, puts Apple third in worldwide PC market share” – January 26, 2011
The bottom line goal of unit share manipulators: Make the average Joe think he’s buying a “winning” product by making Apple products look like they’re “losing.” If the unit share numbers don’t look good for their clients and/or bad for Apple, they’ll concoct other ways to count them until they do.
One thing these shady data massagers can’t hide under tons of questionable data: Apple’s immense profits. That’s why they don’t release monthly press releases on profit share. If they did, they’d be out of business. Profit share, the actual measure of success in a market, is to be ignored at all costs by those in the business of “influencing consumer behavior and buying preferences.”
As we explained back on October 23rd:
The well-heeled customer chooses Apple… These are the desirable customers. These are the customers that pay for substantive R&D. These are the customers that matter. This is why they get the world’s first and only 64-bit smartphone. This is, in fact, why they get the world’s modern smartphone in 2007, years before anyone else gets a serviceable knockoff.
These are the customers that pay for not only the best devices, but also for the best apps and services. This is why market share doesn’t matter for Apple and why Apple doesn’t really care about general market (unit) share. This is why the Mac lived while all the others’ PC businesses slowly died during Microsoft’s dreadful Dark Age of Personal Computing. This is why the Mac continues to thrive today. All of the smart and rich people have Macs. Intelligent developers understand this.
In each market in which it competes, Apple owns the only part of market that matters: Consumers with taste, the ability to discern value, and who possess disposable income and the will to spend it. Google, Samsung et al. can have all of the leftovers. They’re more trouble than they’re worth, which isn’t much, not even en masse.
If you have a billion users who settled for your product because it was part of a Buy One Get One freebie, how much content (music, movies, apps, books, etc.) are they going to buy and to how many paid services are they going to subscribe and how much are they worth to advertisers? Pretty much bupkis on all three counts.
We’d rather have the 400+ million (and rapidly growing) customers with the taste, the intelligence to recognize incredible value, and the money and the will to spend it. Wouldn’t you?
As long as you corner the market on the best customers, and there are enough of them to support a healthy business (very healthy in Apple’s case), market share doesn’t matter.
Related articles:
Smashing Apple: Is Strategy Analytics in Samsung’s pocket? – August 3, 2013
Strategy Analytics claims Android now dominates tablet market – July 31, 2013
Gartner and IDC trumpet wildly incongruous Mac unit sales estimates – April 11, 2013
Canalys unafraid to count iPad, puts Apple third in worldwide PC market share – January 26, 2011