Semi Conscious
Apple, Samsung still hogging all handset profits
Dylan McGrath
11/1/2012 2:17 PM EDT
As was the case in the second quarter of this year, electronics heavyweights Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. took all of the profits in cellular handsets—and then some—in the third quarter, according to Michael Walkley, an analyst at Canaccord Genuity Corp.
Combined, Apple and Samsung took 106 percent of handset profits in the third quarter, down slightly from 108 percent in the second quarter, according to Walkley. The percentage is greater than 100 to offset for operating losses incurred by struggling vendors like Research in Motion, Nokia and Motorola.
"With Samsung extending its overall smartphone and Android market share combined with Apple’s strength in high-end smartphones, competing smartphone OEMs continued to struggle to compete with these dominant smartphone OEMs," Walkley wrote in a recent report.
Click on image to enlarge and expand
Suppliers of chips and other components to iPhones and Samsung Galaxy smartphones aren't complaining, though. According to Walkley, Qualcomm, Avago, RF Micro Devices and Skyworks Solutions and others all stand to benefit from a strong ramp up in LTE smartphones. All are suppliers to the iPhone 5 and should benefit from Apple's far-reaching rollout of the phone, which Apple plans to launch in more than 100 countries, including China, by the fourth quarter of the year.
Samsung, which surpassed Nokia as the top overall handset supplier earlier this year, saw its handset market share increase slightly to 25.6 percent in the third quarter. Apple, meanwhile, saw its overall handset share dip slightly to 6.3 percent.
Combined, Apple and Samsung took 106 percent of handset profits in the third quarter, down slightly from 108 percent in the second quarter, according to Walkley. The percentage is greater than 100 to offset for operating losses incurred by struggling vendors like Research in Motion, Nokia and Motorola.
"With Samsung extending its overall smartphone and Android market share combined with Apple’s strength in high-end smartphones, competing smartphone OEMs continued to struggle to compete with these dominant smartphone OEMs," Walkley wrote in a recent report.
Click on image to enlarge and expand
Suppliers of chips and other components to iPhones and Samsung Galaxy smartphones aren't complaining, though. According to Walkley, Qualcomm, Avago, RF Micro Devices and Skyworks Solutions and others all stand to benefit from a strong ramp up in LTE smartphones. All are suppliers to the iPhone 5 and should benefit from Apple's far-reaching rollout of the phone, which Apple plans to launch in more than 100 countries, including China, by the fourth quarter of the year.
Samsung, which surpassed Nokia as the top overall handset supplier earlier this year, saw its handset market share increase slightly to 25.6 percent in the third quarter. Apple, meanwhile, saw its overall handset share dip slightly to 6.3 percent.
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Bert22306
11/1/2012 3:41 PM EDT
Samsung is taking the safer route, IMO, by offering a range of products. Apple, catering only to the most fashion-conscious, is at a higher risk of seeing it all evaporate.
People have a way of believing that the status quo is the "new normal," and will remain for the rest of time. But it's never that way. It wasn't that many years ago that Apple was struggling. And it wasn't that many years ago that day traders were raking in millions for almost no work. And that we were all being told how the economy had changed forever.
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SylvieBarak
11/1/2012 3:43 PM EDT
Well, currently, they are the only two phone companies really innovating and coming up with compelling devices users want, so it's not terribly surprising. But maybe Windows 8, and associated Windows Phone 8, will give other companies the differentiation they need. we'll see.
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GroovyGeek
11/2/2012 1:32 AM EDT
This is a statement that some would take issue with. The HTC One X is in many ways superior to the S3, in some ways demonstrably so (screen, build quality, UI overlay). It is not clear that either Apple or Samsung are particularly innovative at this point. But you can't argue that they are capturing all the profits. However the causal relationship to innovation is not there, IMO
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Jay_EE
11/2/2012 10:54 AM EDT
It depends how you define innovation . People dont buy the HTC One X because of its poor battery life and no SD card slot. They were also burnt by poor qualities of HTC's previous phones. Consumers are not totally dumb. They know which devices are overall best.
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moronda
11/6/2012 6:35 AM EST
MIPS just got bought by Imagination.
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