Following Apple's Record Quarter Announcement, Samsung Reports Profit Drop

[Piggie]

I was screaming about the tiny screens for 3 years....and got flamed repeatedly on this board. Anyone who has used an ip6+ for a week CAN'T go back to the size of an ip5.

Oh yes, indeed, I and many others remember this so well.

No one wants stupid Phablets like Samsung Makes, Apple has it right, Apple even showed you the year before how their size was right.

Now of course all that is forgotten.

If Apple made a round watch next year it would be the right thing to do, despite a round watch being stupid now, as Apple are not making one.

We've seen this happen year after year, product after product.

 

[Steve121178]

Apple killed Samsung. Fanboys rejoice

We need Samsung/HTC etc to be brilliant and push Apple. What incentive would Apple have to improve/innovate is there was no competition?

 

[hanafuda]

because Apple copied Samsung with Phatphone?

*Cough* Dell Streak 5 *Cough*

 

[thekeyring]

let's be serious. Apple copied Samsung by producing Phatphone and succeed. So i guess we can call it even.

Do people actually accuse Samsung of "bullying"? I guess it's only okay when Apple does it (with I'm Mac commerical)

The Mac vs PC commercials were good. Like the Cortana vs Siri ads are good, and the Surface vs MacBook Air ads are good. The Android ads only subtly poke fun at the idea of everyone having the same phone, but I like them.

The Samsung ads often insult Apple users, and can appear arrogant.

As an Apple customer, these ads make me like Samsung less - they've hurt Samsung'a brand image, where as other rivals' adverts don't.

 

[gnasher729]

In fact Apple has remained stagnant, Samsung has dropped, and all the other manufacturers have increased their numbers... Apple has a very long way to go to be worldwide number one.

And a continued drop in iPad sales is nothing to celebrate either. Apples big sales boost has come from China, the market it just entered. So if the chart in my link is anything to go by, it is other manufactures who have taken Samsungs share and not Apple.

You have a strange definition of "stagnant". Apple announces record sales, and you see that as "stagnant". Apple is the worldwide number one already - if you count revenue.

And a strange, strange thing has happened. Over the years, more and more phones have turned into smartphones. So while Apple's share of the total phone market was growing (and the initial target according to Steve Jobs was one percent in units of the total phone market), that shift meant that Apple's share of the smartphone market has been dropping. But now, where Apple has actually sold as many smartphones as Samsung, now the non-smartphones have to be counted! Can we now say that there is no smartphone market anymore, and Apple's market share has actually been growing year after year after year?

 

[uberzephyr]

Erm? I just said that the other competitors are hitting Samsung, Apple has remained stagnant? How is that beating Samsung? When it's shipped units haven't changed. Apple competes in the worldwide market of smartphones.

Again: the numbers quoted in this reference are total annual sales. If you instead compare the last quarter sales figures, after the iPhone 6/6+ came out, the SmartPhone sales are dead even (74.5M). As a tiebreaker, Apple is ahead in profitability by miles, and their growth curve is headed in the opposite direction (up) from Samsung (down)

 

[thekeyring]

[/COLOR]

We need Samsung/HTC etc to be brilliant and push Apple. What incentive would Apple have to improve/innovate is there was no competition?

Yes we do, but what we don't need is a company copying Apple then using ads to imply Appke is the copycat.

 

[gnasher729]

Strange, how making only $5B profit is now seen as a disaster. So a record for Apple 3 years ago, is now seen as poor for someone else today? To quote some folks on here, there are companies all over the planet, leading their sectors who could only dream of numbers like this. There will likely only be 7 or 8 companies this year who could achieve better.

Samsung is a massive conglomerate producing everything from household goods, ships, phones, semiconductors. They just had a 36% drop in profit. After a 60% drop in profit earlier. Mobiles profit has dropped by half. After dropping 70% earlier. That's catastrophic. That's where normally heads should be rolling.

 

[uberzephyr]

It's the blind leading the blind on here. App stores existed before either Google or Apple had theirs and fingerprint sensors existed on phones before either. Odd as it might seem, Apple didn't create the earth in seven days either.

I agree about the App store, but TouchID fingerprint sensor is innovative because IT WORKS! I had a fingerprint sensor an a laptop years ago, yes. Stopped trying to use it because it so rarely worked. I don't have an Android phone myself, but everything I have read says their version is still crap compared with Apple's implementation.

 

[gnasher729]

That's because of the 40% profit Apple makes on every phone sold, one day people will realise that. And as for the insult of Samsung copying, such a funny hypocritical comment, considering the Apple Phablet that rips off Android completely in conception.

Your claim is absolutely stupid. It is easy to make a phone in every size. That's not copying. And it's not ripping off.

On the other hand, having a 133 page book analysing the iOS user interface, comparing it to Samsung's UI, and taking notes how Samsung's UI needs changing, _that_ is copying.

I love all the Samsung doom and gloom here, especially considering Samsung's profits are in the trillions and Apple's profits are only in the billions.

You deserve a prize. I think everyone else noticed that Samsung's profits are trillions of Won. Right now, one US dollar = 1.096.895 Korean Won. Apple's quarterly profits were 19.7 trillion Won.

 

[hanafuda]

A

Give me a 'P'

 

[Winni]

Success: the one thing Samsung can't steal from Apple.

It looks like Samsung is pretty successful, and they are still selling more smartphones than Apple.

But unless you own Apple shares, please tell us how it improves YOUR life when Apple has a record quarter?

Whenever I read that Apple is stock-piling hundreds of billions of (largely un-taxed) dollars on some bank accounts, all I can think of is how much good could be done with that money if corporations were forced to make ethical decisions. 100 billion bucks could most likely bring forth a cure for cancer. It could build schools and provide education. There's no limit to what could be done with that money. All it does right now is sit on a bank account. And as I've said before, that's not even capitalistic - it's just capital that's not being used for anything useful, not even for their own product research or QA (and especially Apple's software QA could really need a boost).

And no, I'm not American. Neither am I a socialist. But this is just immoral.

 

[thekeyring]

Unless you're an investor and have stock in the company, that means almost nothing. Samsung will continue to produce mobile and devices and tablets going forward, and a forum full of people predicting Samsung's demise isn't going to do a thing to change that.

No, but unless they reverse the downward trend in profits, they will eventually be in trouble.

I agree they're still making enough money and have enough cash to turn it around.

 

[uberzephyr]

Originally Posted by chocolaterabbit View Post

People aren't rubbing it into Samsung because they are doing badly, people are rubbing it into journalists who were quick to declare that Apple were going to crash due to Apple not making a cheap phone when Samsung has plenty. This proves that people are willing to pay for a premium phone if they think it's worth it, and that pure sales numbers/market share don't necessarily mean profits.

__________________

I haven't seen any evidence of this at all, just the usual Mac Rumors childish comment.

What part are you referring to that you haven't seen evidence of? That journalists write articles telling Apple how their business model is wrong? Go look at any number of archived Macalope columns... That people are willing to pay the premium price? Why did Apple outsell even Xiaomi in China last quarter, their phones are 3x-5x more expensive. Or that pure sales numbers don't necessarily mean profits. Look at percentage of units sold, and percentage of profits. Compare Samsung with Apple in both categories.

There's your evidence, so which of those haven't you seen?

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I haven't seen any evidence of this at all, just the usual Mac Rumors childish comment.

Wait, if this is Samsung's fifth straight quarter of declines, how can it mark their first annual decline? Four straight quarters of decline has to be an annual decline, so shouldn't that have been last quarter?

Not if the first quarterly decline occurred as the last quarter of their fiscal year, and the overall year was positive.

 

[thekeyring]

It's the blind leading the blind on here. App stores existed before either Google or Apple had theirs and fingerprint sensors existed on phones before either. Odd as it might seem, Apple didn't create the earth in seven days either.

But they brought all those things together, in a phone. Apple didn't event touch screens either, but it was still surprising they released a phone that was all screen and no keyboard.

Didn't some criticise it because of this?

 

[gnasher729]

- The revenues and profit margins from being fab chip maker are not even in the same league as the ones coming from selling their own phone.

They didn't use to be. However, Samsung's mobile profits crumbled while their semiconductor profits grew. In the previous quarter, mobile profits were twice as much as semiconductor (and that was after a 70% profit drop already). This quarter, semiconductor profit is about 30% higher.

Semiconductor is right now Samsung's most profitable department.

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Funny enough, companies never stopped releasing tablets with "rounded corners", so what's up with his "rounded corner patent"?!?!?!

Apple has design patents that describe for example the design of an iPad. To be guilty of copying, you have to duplicate every single part of that design. One of the design parts are rounded corners. Obviously a huge number of idiots who don't understand the difference between utility patents and design patents and didn't understand how design patents worked all started screaming.

Samsung also has design patents. For phones and tablets with rounded corners.

 

[uberzephyr]

I never realized that before, and it's kind of hilarious, actually:

Samsung makes their own chips, but they don't even use them, instead selling them to Apple and buying Qualcomm's chips.

In regards to semiconductors, Apple is a design house, Qualcomm is a design house, Samsung is a foundry for design houses and also for their own internal designs.

Apple designs their processors, but manufactures them at Samsung (and now TSMC). Qualcomm designs their processors, and manufactures them at Samsung and TSMC also (and possibly others), although I would imagine the ones that go into Samsung phones are the subset manufactured at Samsung. iPhones also use Flash RAM designed and manufactured by Samsung.

 

[gnasher729]

Considering where their finances are going, maybe the next big thing for Samsung is to stop making phones and focus on making components for other companies to make phones with instead.

That's like totally different companies. Like in the USA you have Apple and Intel, doing totally different things, and in Korea you have Samsung mobile and Samsung semiconductor. Samsung semiconductor is doing their thing; they wouldn't care if Samsung mobile went out of business.

 

[thekeyring]

let's be serious. Apple copied Samsung by producing Phatphone and succeed. So i guess we can call it even.

The first phone with a 'giant' screen: the iPhone.

The competitors made their screens slightly bigger and Samsung has increased the screen size every year to make its new phone look better than last year's model. They accidentally arrived at the S5 having a 5.1 inch screen.

The first Samsung phone to leap into big screens immediately through a clear design choice (not an evolutionary accident) was the Galaxy Tab, from 2010. And that was launched as an iPad competitor.

 

[gnasher729]

We need Samsung/HTC etc to be brilliant and push Apple. What incentive would Apple have to improve/innovate is there was no competition?

The incentive is millions and millions of people buying improved phones.

 

[uberzephyr]

I love all the Samsung doom and gloom here, especially considering Samsung's profits are in the trillions and Apple's profits are only in the billions.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not... Are you really comparing trillions of one currency to billions of a different currency?? (that happens to have an exchange rate of about 1100:1)

 

[s2mikey]

It looks like Samsung is pretty successful, and they are still selling more smartphones than Apple.

But unless you own Apple shares, please tell us how it improves YOUR life when Apple has a record quarter?

Whenever I read that Apple is stock-piling hundreds of billions of (largely un-taxed) dollars on some bank accounts, all I can think of is how much good could be done with that money if corporations were forced to make ethical decisions. 100 billion bucks could most likely bring forth a cure for cancer. It could build schools and provide education. There's no limit to what could be done with that money. All it does right now is sit on a bank account. And as I've said before, that's not even capitalistic - it's just capital that's not being used for anything useful, not even for their own product research or QA (and especially Apple's software QA could really need a boost).

And no, I'm not American. Neither am I a socialist. But this is just immoral.

Thanks for getting it. Keep in mind too that you and me pay more taxes because of this untaxed cash piling that goes on. In fairness it is NOT just Apple doing it but they are a huge player in that game.

I own stocks in companies too like many other people but I'd much prefer a slightly lower return and good jobs for my fellow Americans. Or, I'd pay a little more for my devices. I mean that too. I wish others agreed with me.

 

[uberzephyr]

So you concede that in the last holiday quarters that Samsung launched their flagships they sold more than Apple did in their best ever holiday quarter?

No. Why would you interpret it that way? In Samsung's best holiday quarter they sold more than Apple's best holiday quarter, but that's not what you're asking him to concede. Those "bests" came in different years. Samsung releases new phones in the spring, Apple in the fall. Apple's last quarter sales were up in 2014 compared to 2013. Samsung's were down in the same comparison.

 

[MacMulti]

Apple killed Samsung. Fanboys rejoice

It needs not be killed. It just self destruct.

 

[Michael Scrip]

It looks like Samsung is pretty successful, and they are still selling more smartphones than Apple.

Samsung and Apple virtually tied for sales last quarter. We'll need to meet back here in April to see how they did this quarter.

Don't forget... Samsung has been selling fewer and fewer smartphone the last couple of quarters... which is shocking considering they sell across a broader range of price points to reach more customers.

Meanwhile... Apple has been selling more and more smartphones... which are all rather expensive phones.

But they finally equaled each other in smartphone sales last quarter. Crazy.

Moving forward... I can't imagine iPhones becoming less popular over the next 3 months... nor can I imagine Samsung phones suddenly becoming more popular and reversing their downward trend during the same time.

So... Apple could actually beat Samsung in smartphone sales next quarter.

2015 might be pretty exciting. Well... maybe not for Samsung.

.