Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
THE APPLE IPHONE accounts for just four per cent of global mobile phone sales – but makes more than half of the entire industry’s profits.
According to a study by Canaccord Genuity, Apple holds a 4.2 per cent share of the mobile phone market worldwide. However, sales of the iPhone generate 52 per cent of the market’s profits.
Company analyst Michael Walkley said the company could increase its share of industry profits to 60 per cent in the next quarter, the Daily Mail reports.
The study also shows a collapse in profits for former market leader Nokia. According to Forbes, in 2007 Nokia had 67 per cent of mobile phone profits while Apple had four per cent. Now their situations are reversed and Nokia has just four per cent.
Smartphones are by far the most profitable sector of the mobile phone market. Together, Apple and Samsung account for 81 per cent of industry profits.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Reading this on my iphone i can’t help but feel a bit ripped off!
Laughing so hard my sides are splitting. As I always said it’s an over priced fashion accessory. Sending this on my lovely Samsung Galaxy S2 which I got on free upgrade while iPhone was 200 euro. Kept money in my pocket. Not one bit of sympathy for you iPhone owners.
Fantastic Apple business model. Create status devices that people ‘must have’ then overcharge like hell. You have to hand it to them, they have figured out that some people are happy to pay a lot more for style than substance.
Apple sold around 100m phones TOTAL yet Nokia sold over 430m last year alone, yet Apple are the clear winner (financially).
Intersting stat from Finland, last month the new Nokia N9 outsold all other phones. Hope it will be sold here.
Nokia may have the greater numbers but most of these are low grade handsets sold in Africa and developing countries with little to no margin. Apple sell their phones at a massive profit
@Titus, that was kinda my point. Nokia sales far exceed Apples but it is Apple who have created this model where they can charge pretty much whatever they want and still get sales.
You can’t bring it with you…
Apple provide constant software updates and revisions, where as many android phones bought in a shop are already 2 revs behind the latest and can not be updated as the hardware does not support it. Those figures above are kinda shocking but you get what you pay for I guess. Quality and support over generic components and poor support is important to me, albeit the seemingly high profit they make from them I’ll always pay more for quality.
Pays for quality! ROFL
They released the 4G with Inherrent signal problems and their attitude to users was to hold it a different way!! They then rush release a 4S to get the christmas market because they had no new ideas and this comes on to the market with a software problem which drains the battery at crazy rates.
Ever heard of proper Q & A ? not to mention their distinctly easy to smash front and rear glass screens. On a mobile ffs. Style of substance and they manage to get all these crazy profits by spitballing the workers in china and then claim to be all about workers rights.
If only you could see through the myriad of shiney black glossy glass …………………..
Not really accurate, Android phones are guaranteed updates for 18 months after their release.
Don’t understand what you mean by “generic components”, seeing as Samsung, LG and Foxconn manufacture an awful lot of Apple’s products? If anything that’s a reason not to like Apple. That and the slave labour.
Aside from that, you make the comparison between all of the Android handsets (and there’s literally hundreds) to the newer iPhones. This isn’t really a fair comparison, only the top-end Android phones (e.g. HTC Sensations XE and XL, Motorola’s Droid Bionic and Droid RAZR, Samsungs Galaxy SII range et cetera) would be the iPhone’s proper opposite number, and all of them are getting the update to Android 4.0.
Damhsa keep kidding yourself. The Samsung Galaxy S2 Android phone was so good that apple ran sacred to the courts to block it.
@Family guy, yea I know, your right. Thats the phone I wanted but wasnt available when my last contract expired and I upgraded. I went for an Iphone and now wish i hadnt. Quality build but I dont like being locked down.
But why did they run to the courts with Samsung? thats a different conversation as Apple led the way with a lot of this tech and patented it. Some things like video calling is new I know to them but even the swipe unlock and UI – Apple have patented and developed a lot of this, along with the capacitance touch screens tech.
The Iphone is popular and many of the other manufactures have blatantly designed their devices like the Iphone.
There is loads of Android phones on the market but that’s only the OS. The hardware in the apple products are to a higher quality standard than in the majority of devices out there. The high end S2 and the likes could possible be parallel. That’s what I mean by quality hardware, I cant count how many people I know with problems with LG, Samsung and HTC phones, buttons falling off, back covers loose, poor call quality, poor camera & lens, calls dropping, phone restarting and going back to factory default twice a week… the list go’s on.
I feel for Nokia they didn’t move from Symbian sooner. The market wanted more from phones and Apple were fast to deliver just like with the ipod. bye bye Minidisc and CDs. I have always been a fan of Nokia’s high end phones and hopefully soon can go back to them, sadly Win7 on a phone doesn’t really appeal to much to me.
@Brian, Generic components refer to the what Foxconn will make for both Samsung and LG and many more manufactures, thye will buy them “off he shelf” so to speak from Foxconn. Apple will demand higher spec parts, higher tolerances and higher grade materials used. It’s like a 2 Gb stick of Ram for 8 euro might be found in a cheap laptop on sale in PC World where Apples Ram will have a list of strict high criteria before its used by them in any of their laptop range and will be a lot higher spec because of it. Both are RAM, both store volatile memory but 1 will last longer and can be pushed to extremes and worked harder compared to the other. For this you pay 80 quid for.
sorry for the grammer and typo’s, bashed these out during minutes of spare time at work.
Becoming emotionally attached to propriety technology is for those with lots of spare spondooliks.
Nokia’s lost market share isn’t _just_ because Apple are so popular. The hole Nokia are in is their own creation because Nokia kept clinging to the dead dog that was Symbian. Only recently, far too late, have they realised that they need to use a 3rd party OS. Nokia make superior hardware than most if not all other vendors. When the first iPhone came out I was using an N95 that kicked the iPhones ass in hardware. Yet the Symbian OS sucked. THAT was their downfall. If they embraced Android at the right time they would have the Android market cornered, Samsung and HTC would be the also-rans. Now they are going with WP7 which being late to the game will be playing catch-up for a long time, having to contend with already established iOS, Android, and Blackberry, for app developers.
Nokia are also in the situation now where they have embraced WP7 which itself is not up to scratch, yet the two OSs which they were supposed to kill off, Meego & Symbian, are actually pretty damned good!
Just 10 years ago the present mobile devices would have seemed miraculous.
Thumbs up to Google Android and Apple iPhone.
Competition will make them both better.
Poor ol’ Nokia.
It was Europe’s only answer to Silicon Valley.
Europe should be worried about falling behind the Americans.
Next thing we will be playing Baseball.
It’d be nice if The Journal covered something other than Apple in their tech news.
As I type this on my iPhone!!! My hubby has a samsung galaxy and can’t wait to be able to upgrade to an iPhone. The difference I huge. They are supposedly the same but everything is just easier to use on the iPhone. I’m a convert and will never go back! I’ve tried every make brand etc over the last 14 years and I’ve had this phone 2 years and still no itchy feet. The longest I’d ever kept a phone before was a year. Most of them even less!
have your say