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Apple and Samsung Claim 99% of Profits Among Top Mobile Phone Vendors
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I've already addressed this:
People are forgetting here. Google are fundamentally a data mining company. Not a mobile phone company and certainly not a hardware manufacturer. The function of android is to extend their data capturing abilities. Not to make money directly itself.
How is blu ray and usb3 half assed? I dont want bluray on my next macbook but usb3 would be nice!
As far as Apple has claimed they were waiting for Intel to have USB3 integrated in their chip or something like that so they didn't have to use a third party controller + I supposed they were keeping space for Thunderbolt both physically on the board and on the marketing level. If Ivy Bridge has USB3 native support it would be on the next Mac.
You should look deeper into it. Google was seeing the signs that mobile web was the future and it was pretty signs were their that Apple was thinking about heading into that market and MS already was their.
Neither of those 2 companies should be trusted at all. They both have a long history of backstabbing former allias. Apple much more so than MS.
These means they had to make damn sure that those 2 players did not dictate the future of mobile web development and the HTML5. Apple is making a mess of HTML5 trying to push fair amount of extra crap in their that does not belong.
Either way these means Google needed something to make sure that the future of the web did not block them out and Google had to make sure they had a huge say in how the development of mobile web went. In many ways it worked out much better for us all that they did this. Forces web developers to be more standard compliant in mobile web site design and not doing iOS designing only. Also limited both MS and Apple power in controlling things and locking out the open source communities.
Others make more phones, but also more varieties.
Apple is gaining production scale by eliminating variations (albeit there are still variations for carriers and flash memory) and running the production for what looks like to be three years for three generations of iPhone.
You have to believe that three years of production on a single generation gets you great efficiency and reliability, not to mention lowest cost components. All of which add to the profit margin.
This is all baked in, and Samsung will as well start paring back models once they have been firmly established as the volume Android manufacturer.
MMI is done unless Google gives them an exclusive nexus build. But that would create unhappiness with the OEM's.
Either way, its a race to commoditization for Android OEM"s, and little profit for all but Samsung.
Some may be thinking that achieving 30-45% margins on products that are better made and more functional than the competition yet still cost about the same is easy.
Tim Cook would disagreeSo would all those other companies.
And Apple's iPhone margins are a lot higher than 30-45%! Their company-wide margins were 45% in the latest quarter. Mac margins were always in the 30% range. iTunes Store margins are considerably under 30%. Leaving the iPhone and iPad as the significant revenue drivers with margins over the company average.
When I see the break down of where Apple profits are coming from they seem to have way to many eggs on the iPhone. That is what over 50% of their profit.
It's time for Apple to create their own search engine. Why allow Google to profit from their platform while simultaneously stabbing them in the back? It makes no sense.
Eventually Samsung will tire of being the preeminent ad platform for Google and fork their own version of Android with their own advertising stream, removing Google from the equation (see: Amazon Fire). What happens to Google when the other hardware makers can't make any money servicing Google's data-collection needs?
Wouldn't Apple be far better off sorting out iAds to hit at Google more? With the way so much content is going towards dedicated apps, if Apple ever cut Google out of that on iOS it would be quite a pain for Google.
Looking good? Really? How much do you think that Google is going to get for a "settop box and phone manufacturer" without any patents that is losing money every quarter? It's going to take a long time for the couple hundred million in revenue that Google made last year from Android to produce enough profit to offset a multi-billion dollar purchase of MMI patents.
The only thing that would have Google looking good in this acquisition is if MMI is turned around into a significant profit maker.
If Apple can capture 70+% of the profits with 8% of the overall mobile phone market, then imagine what they can do as more mobile phones convert to smartphones and they move into the 15 to 20% range of the mobile phone market.
Their profits figure to triple over the next two years if they only capture 20% of the overall mobile phone market share and they just manage 40% of the tablet market which is growing at an incredible clip at the expense of the PC industry. Those market-share numbers are very very conservative considering Apple currently owns over 70% of the tablet market, and they constitute at least 40% (if not 60%) of all smartphone sales on every carrier where they are available (with many carriers still left untapped).
As an AAPL investor I am loving this. Even if their P/E ratio stays low at 15 or 16, at triple the profits we are looking at $1500 to $1800 per share in two years. I've never seen a company in a better position to capitalize on market opportunities than Apple.
Their profits figure to triple over the next two years if they only capture 20% of the overall mobile phone market share and they just manage 40% of the tablet market which is growing at an incredible clip at the expense of the PC industry. Those market-share numbers are very very conservative considering Apple currently owns over 70% of the tablet market, and they constitute at least 40% (if not 60%) of all smartphone sales on every carrier where they are available (with many carriers still left untapped).
As an AAPL investor I am loving this. Even if their P/E ratio stays low at 15 or 16, at triple the profits we are looking at $1500 to $1800 per share in two years. I've never seen a company in a better position to capitalize on market opportunities than Apple.
Lately all the rage seems to be samsung android phones. iPhones are too expensive for most folks around here. Nokia is almost gone, Sony barely moving and rim is another sinking ship. Nokia had a giant publicity surge but it faded out fast.
Most of the sales person I spoke to recommended either samsung or apple, since they say they are having many problems with the other brands (mainly software).
Most of the sales person I spoke to recommended either samsung or apple, since they say they are having many problems with the other brands (mainly software).
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Ditto, I'm so glad i got in when i did. Apple is going places, and the direction is up. never had so much success in stocks like i did when i bought Apple
"iPhone and related products and services" is about 58% of their revenue, so it would be an even higher percentage of their profits. (iPod was around the same percentage in 2006.)
So I have to ask,...and I really don't know, I'm no business person...but I'm wondering...it seems like the initial years of new platform/device manufacturing should be some of the more profitable ones...after recouping R&D costs, it seems like there would be a sweet spot where profits would be at their best (although this doesn't seem to be the case for Apple)...and yet, most android phone manufacturers are not making a profit...it seems like this race to the bottom in terms of android device prices has made it extremely difficult for most android manufacturers to make money...so my question becomes, where does the incentive come from in the future to improve this platform? If I'm HTC, and I can't turn a profit anytime in the next few years, I would think that as a business I would start reducing my investment in that technology...Android as an adopted platform seems to be doing very well (better than Apple when not considering profits by manufacturers), but if manufacturers lose incentive to improve the hardware down the road, it seems like that may turn the table back in favor of Apple or another platform....
Fair enough, but Apple is not innocent either. They all stab eachother in the back.
Given that there is literally no other product in the world that is comparable to the iPhone in profit, I'm not sure what you are suggesting Apple should do about this. The company has not put "too many eggs on the iPhone", as it has a wide range of other products. The iPhone just happens to be the golden egg, the likes of which don't exist anywhere else in the retail world.
The settop box side makes money.
The phone side would probably make money if they dropped non-smartphones, but it they sold it, any amount at all would be a winner; they'd still have paid less per patent.
How much has Apple gotten out of their Nortel investment?
As for Android, it's not meant to be a revenue stream to be depended upon. Its primary purpose is leverage against Apple and Microsoft's Bing.
I think you are correct; this is currently the biggest threat to the Android platform, its rapid commoditization. And this is exactly the situation that Apple is trying to avoid.
