Gosh
Again, statistics can say anything, but this means one of several things to me:
1) Android is racing to the bottom in price and competitors try to undercut the iPhone or each other. That race to the bottom is driving overall unit sales by making smartphones more affordable. But while Android phones are becoming a commodity, Apple is the only manufacturer who has been able to differentiate itself and has not had to do the "race to the bottom" to sell units.
2) Other manufacturers are not nearly as cost-effective as Apple in their development of smartphones, hence their cost base is reducing their overall profitability, even though they may have very good revenue numbers.
3) Some combination of (1) and (2).
The fact that Apple's 20% revenue translating into 50% profits is interesting to me. However the 4% market-share number is based on all handset owners regardless if they purchased a new phone in the last 3 years or not. I'd be more interested in percentage of unit sales by quarter alongside the revenue and profit stats. The questions I would like answered are:
1) How many people are buying one manufacturers phone over another by quarter.
2) How much revenue did the manufacturer make per unit sold.
3) How much profit did the manufacturers make per unit sold.
4) How much of the revenue per unit sold was carrier-subsidy paid to the manufacturer (i.e.: how much is the average consumer actually willing to pay for the device).
Anyway, those are my thoughts.
EDIT: If you follow the link you do get number of units sold by quarter as well -- Apple is NOT shrinking in number of units by quarter, and Motorola is practically giving away the phones if you look at unit sales versus profit.
Before we get too smug over Apple's superiority.. and while Apple's share of the profits still is impressive..
One Massive thing to note is that these manufacturers are NOT exclusively smartphone makers.
So while Apple only has the iPhone range, with which it can evidently skim lots of profits:
Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Nokia etc sell a lots of 'dumbphones'
on which the profits are going to be a lot smaller.
This is going to be a larger factor in the discrepancy, which is hinted at in the original article: "Apple focussing on premium end etc. ie Smartphones.
Good comparison would be Droid X vs iPhone 4, and look at profits per unit to really see how good Apple is in managing costs/extracting 'value' out of the consumer.
All this 'race to the bottom' talk is deliberate for certain handsets, however these manufacturers, having more than model (thank god for the consumer like me who likes choice) all have their premium top of the range which sell exactly for as much as iPhone 4, some Android phones even having improved/more modern components eg SGX 540, larger SAMOLED screens etc.
e.g: Nexus S 429GBP unlocked (16GB 1Ghz Hummingbird (A4), SGX 540, 512MB RAM, 4inch SAMOLED 800x 480)
iPhone 4 499GBP unlocked (16 GB, 800mhz A4, SGX535, 512MB RAM, 3.5 Inch IPS LCD 960 x 680)
would be interesting comparison. the higher res lcd plus glass back and front must cost a fair bit so overal they may cost the same to produce, but one retails 70GBP higher. (Software value is seperate/subjective, just looking purely at hardware) Also, Samsung know they are not going to be pushing iP4 numbers (they wouldnt even want to having their Galaxy X 2 coming out in 2 weeks) so economies of scale would be less.
So while you have the mytouch slides etc. you have the Droid 2, HTC G2 HTC Desire HDs etc, that all are priced comparably to iPhone (though all available on lower plans in UK compared to iPhone, which still requires cash outlay unless you choose a pretty expensive contract)