“Samsung could soon unseat its biggest rival as the tech world’s biggest money making machine,” Sherisse Pham reports for CNN. “The company reported bumper quarterly earnings on Thursday, putting Samsung on track to record a higher operating profit for the period than Apple. Samsung pulled in 61 trillion won ($54.8 billion) in revenue and 14 trillion won ($12.6 billion) in profit for the three months ending June 31.”
“Apple will release its earnings for the same period next week. Analysts expect the iPhone maker to report revenue of $44.9 billion and an operating profit of $10.5 billion, according to Reuters and Bloomberg data,” Pham reports. “It was bumper demand for memory chips that drove [Samsung]’s earnings to new heights. The chips unit posted 8 trillion won ($7.2 billion) in operating profit, or nearly half the group’s total.”
“Samsung will see ‘a meaningful revenue increase’ thanks to the supply of display panels ‘to a major smartphone customer’ in the next three months, Daiwa Capital Markets analyst SK Kim wrote in an investors note,” Pham reports. “That major customer is likely Apple, which has reportedly ordered tens of millions of Samsung display panels for its upcoming iPhone.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote half a decade ago:
You want to know what’s really unbelievable? That, after half a decade, at least, of Samsung’s slavish copying, Apple continues to do billions of dollars of business with Samsung. Apple, which has enough money to build or bankroll anything they want, like a chip fab, or a touch screen display factory, or anything they could ever need.
Something just does not compute here. If you get mugged, do you buy the leather for a new wallet from your mugger while pressing charges? If you’re Tim Cook, you do.
Apple could have – and should have – dropped Samsung like a bad habit years ago. Not one red cent should be going from Apple to Samsung today. It’s a travesty. It’s poor planning. And it’s bad business. The only conclusion we can draw is that Tim Cook, operations genius, boxed Apple in and is now stuck; beholden to a den of thieves. That sort of “decision making” doesn’t bode well for Apple’s future. It really doesn’t.
SEE ALSO:
Apple turns to Samsung for more 3D NAND chip supplies for upcoming iPhones – July 6, 2017
That tired old canard, MDN?
Samsung currently either produces the best of what Apple needs, and/or produces them in high enough quantities that pass Apple’s stringent QA. Apple has tried several times to switch to other providers, with varying degrees of success.
It is not Apple’s fault that Samsung happens to be the top of the components game. It’s not Apple’s fault that, despite sinking billions into other manufacturers, they cannot all consistently match the yields and quantities that Apple needs. Nano-scale electronics is freaking hard to get right.
You’d think that a site whose editors worship free market principles would understand that “it’s just business”. Posting this particular 5-year old take without any caveats (like Apple tried hard yet not fully succeeded in getting away from Samsung components) doesn’t make you insightful, it makes you incredibly shortsighted.
Apple obviously didn’t try hard enough and, boy, did I suck at picking Apple CEOs.
So, it’s now been a decade+ since Samsung started ripping off Apple and Apple has more money in the bank than entire countries have in GDP, but Apple just started to try to produce their own OLED displays / help LG to compete?
It most certainly is Apple’s (Cook’s) fscking fault, apologist.
MDN’s Take is, as usual, spot on:
It’s poor planning. And it’s bad business. The only conclusion we can draw is that Tim Cook, operations genius, boxed Apple in and is now stuck; beholden to a den of thieves.
For a so-called Regular Reader, you sure as hell have no excuse for not knowing that I’m no blind Apple apologist fanboi.
Are u and MDN aware of the sheer scale of Apples operations? And the dynamics involved to pull something like this off…and how it fits in and/or affects other operational aspects of Apple ?
Or u just like making naive comments thinking they make you sound smart .. rather than shortsighted.
You believe no one at Apple contemplated on getting rid of samsung… and that u, mdn and few other readers are the geniuses with that insight and potential strategy .
Being an Armchair ceo is easy friend!… get into the real elements and then lets see what u can pull off.
Bashing Tim is getting old…
Give the man a brake…. he is not where he is because he is stupid . …. but like everyone else he has his flaws.. so did Steve!
And please do some of us a favor and read the first post on this thread by Mossman !
PS..
The Real enemy who has caused the most damage to Apple has not been Samsung… its been Google! And a scum called Eric Mole Schidth..
Then Hey, why hasnt Apple taken over the search business, start a youtube like service of their own and then kick Googles butt in AI and advertising.
Its easy to talk.. much harder to do the walk…
People runing Apple are not stupid. … at least not on such obvious issues.
MDN’s Take is the polar opposite of “shortsighted.” It was verifiably, obviously prescient.
If Apple had acted the day MDN wrote that Take, they’d be free of Samsung today and Samsung would not now be generating more revenue than Apple by selling both iPhone knockoffs and components for real iPhones.
You are either an Apple apologist or a Tim Cook apologist or both. None of those options serves Apple well at all.
Lol calling me an apologist… BWAHAHAHAHA!
Check my post history, boy. I’m one of the ones that that slammed Apple for their mistreatment of Mac pros with the languishing Mac Pro long before MDN finally jumped on the bandwagon. And that’s just one of the many things I’ve called Apple out on. Others include the ridiculous shortage of max RAM on even their latest MBP, the un-necessary thinness of the recent iMac, etc, etc.
In other words, unlike you I’m a true Apple fan: I like their products overall but not afraid to loudly call them out on things. This is not one of those things.
You on the other hand are an anonymous coward with no post history. You don’t have any moral authority to judge who are the apologists on this board.
…chink by chink, Pipeline Timmy’s Apple begins rotting from within. Next, all the great talent employed at Apple will start sending out resumés..
“real artists ship.”
Having worked in consumer electronics and semiconductors for many years, including doing business with Samsung, I can tell you the reality is Samsung is known throughout the global industry for the highest quality and most stringent standards. Many components will ONLY be adopted by other companies AFTER Samsung has commercialized them successfully.
Though they most definitely copy innovations developed by others (like many Asian companies) they are still known for making great products at the component and finished goods levels – exploding batteries aside.
They have the engineers, the manufacturing processes, the scale & capacity and the capital to do things other companies just can’t do. That Apple is investing huge capital in LG’s OLED process is a really big deal. It is an acknowlegement that freeing themselves from Samsung is an existential threat (well, they will survive just fine, but their ability to innovate and differentiate would be severely compromised over the long run.) The only company that can keep up with Samsung’s capacity and capital IS Apple. So here we are…Apple has awoken.
would that Apple awoken back when MDN advised
I will add that I don’t think the average reader or even MDN has any sense of the complexity, scale, time involved and risks associated with the types of things Samsung is able to do. If it were so easy, then Apple would be able to go to lots of other companies as an alternative. They couldn’t and they can’t – that’s why they have to team up with LG who, luckily, has a pretty good OLED process.
Just like Apple has sustainable advantages, Samsung does, too.
“I don’t think the average reader or even MDN has any sense of the complexity, scale, time involved and risks associated with the types of things Samsung is able to do”
Perfect evidence of this are the silly posts claiming I’m an “apologist” in response to my earlier post.
No, what is amazing is that even though Samsung stopped copying Apple by Apple’s own admission in 2011, Apple fans still falsely claim that Samsung copies Apple.
What is even more amazing: Apple fans still make this claim even though Apple has been copying Samsung ever since 2014.
Phablet form factor? Samsung first.
Mobile payments/NFC? Samsung first
Quad core SOC? Samsung first
Multi-window UI? Samsung first
Stylus support? Samsung first
Smart bluetooth earpods? Samsung first
Smart watches? Samsung first
And features that will be in the iPhone 8:
wireless charging? Samsung first
OLED screen? Samsung first
waterproofing? Samsung first
face/retinal scanning? Samsung first
getting rid of physical home button? Samsung first
curved screens with no bezels? Samsung first
By contrast NOTHING that Apple has done since 2013 has been copied by Samsung. The last 2 features? Force/3D touch and dumping the headphone jack? Samsung has not and will not do either.
Basically, no Samsung phone has looked anything like an iPhone since Samsung debuted the original Galaxy Note in 2011. However, since Apple debuted the iPhone 6, every iPhone except the SE (which Apple barely speaks of) has looked like a Samsung Galaxy. And the iPhone 8 will be a complete and total Samsung Galaxy clone. It will have NONE of the original iPhone design language, UX/UI or materials. The iPhone 8 will look more like the Samsung Galaxy S8 than it will look like the iPhone 4. If you put the three phones together: iPhone 4, Samsung Galaxy S8, iPhone 8 … and people would believe that the last 2 were made by Apple and the first one was made by Samsung.
And those are just the hardware/design features. I will not even talk about how many iOS features were implemented by either Google via Android or Samsung via TouchWiz first. Again, compare iOS in 2011, iOS in 2017 and Android in 2017 and p eople would insist that the last two were created by Apple and the first by Samsung or Google. Apple has spent the last 4 years shifting their software and hardware to emulate the Samsung Galaxy as much as possible AND PEOPLE ARE STILL CLAIMING THAT IT IS SAMSUNG WHO COPIES APPLE.
Oh yeah: when Apple finally gives Siri AI capabilities in December? It will be months after Bixby, over a year after Google Assistant, and going on 2 years after Alexa. But hey, keep thinking that Apple is the leader and everyone else is following. Apple is only the leader in revenue/profits at this point. In innovation, even iteration, they are following everyone else and have been for years, when the fingerprint scanner and the 64 bit SOC were the last true innovations Apple had to contribute to this space.
Stylus? Samsung first? Seriously? Apple invented the Newton PDA back in the late 1980s early 1990s which used a stylus and owns the patents on it.
Samsung not copying Apple after 2013? Really? Mobile payments? NFC as a payment system is not the same and was not pioneered by Samsung having been around for years on multiple platforms. But Apple introduces an ultra secure and unique ApplePay and then Samsung introduces their unique SamsungPay? Apple introduces Force 3D then Samsung introduces a work alike through a copycat “pressure sensitive touch display” which is how their new home buttons work. So REALLY?
The first smartphone I’ve seen w/o a physical home button was the Sprint version of the Galaxy S2 (Epic 4G Touch).
Oh Apple! 😥