“According to a survey by Strategy Analytics out today, Apple and Samsung tied in smartphone unit shipments in calendar Q4 at 74.5 million,” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “But while Samsung managed to ship the same number of units as Apple, Apple clobbered Samsung on profits. Apple’s greater profitability will allow it to pull ahead of Samsung in unit sales in the coming year. Samsung has already lost the race for smartphone market leadership.”
“Strategy Analytics’ results are only the first of a number of surveys that will come out as earnings season winds down, and the exact number of unit shipments for Samsung may vary from survey to survey. It doesn’t really matter,” Hibben writes. “The important part of the competition is already over, as demonstrated by Samsung’s earnings report.”
“Apple’s greater profitability affords it the capital needed to fuel investment in infrastructure, services, manufacturing and product development that will only serve to increase Apple’s competitive advantage over Samsung in the year ahead,” Hibben writes. “Apple’s smartphone ecosystem is now on a virtuous spiral in which increasing sales only enhance the appeal of the ecosystem, leading to more sales.”
“Rumors that Samsung has captured 75% of the next generation of Apple SOCs, to be fabricated using the new FinFET process, tends to confirm my working assumptions about the continuing Apple/Samsung collaboration at Samsung’s Austin Texas fab. I believe Apple helped fund capex at Austin, and in return Apple will get preferential treatment for the initial production ramp,” Hibben writes. “These next SOCs will make Apple devices even more superior, with better performance combined with improved battery life. Samsung, having been forced to cede the process advantage to its best foundry customer, might have to settle for fabricating Exynos 7 on its older and inferior 20 nm process in 2015, as indicated by the Exynos 7 marketing page. In the process, Samsung will only fall further behind Apple.”
Read more in the full article here.
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