“For the first time in several years, iPhone actually gained market share while Android lost share,” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “This is remarkable when you consider that IDC’s number includes all Android smartphones, even ‘white box’ phones.”
“There’s been a tendency to pass off the calendar Q4 results as just a blip, due to the advent of larger-screen iPhones. IDC itself tended to regard this as merely a short-term demand stimulus,” Hibben writes. “I view the impact completely differently. Since I view iOS as the superior platform, I see the impact of larger screens as unleashing pent-up demand that was inhibited by the small screen of the iPhone 5s and 5c. If I’m correct, demand will be sustained through the next generation of iPhone. Another indicator of the swing in momentum to Apple’s favor is a report from Good Technology on smartphone market share in the enterprise in calendar Q4. According to the report, Apple has a huge lead in activations by enterprise compared to Android, 73% to 25%. This is also an improvement from the previous quarter, when the ratio was 69% to 29%. The report attributes the improvement to the impact of iPhone 6.”
“In addition to the improvement in enterprise adoption, there was the report from Strategy Analytics regarding smartphone profitability. In calendar Q4, Apple’s share of smartphone industry profits reached a new high of 88.7% compared with 11.3% for Android. Compared to Q4 2013, Android saw its profit cut from 29.5% while Apple gained from its 70.5%,” Hibben writes. “If we combine IDC’s unit shipments data with the operating profit data, we obtain the operating profit per phone: $2.26 for Android vs. $97.50 for iOS.”
“The picture for Android is of a mobile device ecosystem that has strangled its profit in its quest for increased market share, and as of calendar Q4, wasn’t even successful in increasing its market share. This was probably no coincidence. Healthy profits have always been important for computing device ecosystems, and a lack of profit has tended to precede ecosystem decline,” Hibben writes. “The battle isn’t over, but I have an intuition that we have seen the turn of the tide.”
Read more in the full article here.
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