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Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021

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Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021

#181
post #18

...with only a 13% share of units. That is, all other vendors together sold 87% of units, but earned only a combined 25% of industry-wide profit. The vast majority of those other vendors are companies headquartered in Asian countries with a long history of promoting market share, access to information, and knowledge transfer at the expense of short-term profit. They might be making less money willingly to grow/mainta…

Apple certainly was the winner of Huawei being pushed out of the USA market. Now they can continue slowly issuing premium features their competition had years ago, like the macro lens in the new iPhone 13. IMO, if Huawei had remained, high-end hardware would have entered a race to the bottom, and Apple would have been the biggest loser, we can't have that.

Huawei was never in the US market. They were pretty dominant in Europe and certain Asian markets and Apple+Samsung probably gained most of the share they lost there.

Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021

#182

I think one of the smartest things Apple did was open physical stores and not depend on carrier stores and Best Buy. I've often wondered why their competitors don't do the same thing? Why isn't there a Samsung store a block away from every Apple store? Having a physical location for purchases, repairs, and support is why I always recommend Apple devices when somebody who isn't super technical asks me what to buy. Mic…

Motorola tried opening a store in downtown Chicago. Didn't seem very busy at all...

Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021

#183
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly all hand set manufactures outside if apple only make money on the device sale not on any app revenue. Are the numbers here broken down by hardware vs software profits? If not, it would seem obvious to me that Apple makes more because they can include all App Store profits after each device sale.

About 50% of Apple’s profits are from the App Store by my calculations[1], although Apple makes it hard to split out App Store profits versus handset profits[2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28638939 [2] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-profitable-is-apples-a...

I think the math in your linked post is wrong; it looks like you’re confusing App Store revenue and Apple revenue.

App Store revenue is the gross sales of the App Store. Apple takes at most 30% of that as their revenue; the rest goes to the app developers.

So to calculate Apple’s profit margin for the App Store, you would compare only that Apple revenue to Apple’s actual costs of running the App Store.

So their App Store profits are not 78% of $64 billion. They are 78% of at most 30% of $64 billion. So no more than $15 billion, not $50 billion.

Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scale is the easiest way to make something cheap, and having a device targeted at every human rather than just school kids is going to be the best way to achieve scale. But as far as education goes, phones aren’t as good as a laptop as far as form factor. But better than nothing I suppose!

More likely is that cell phones all have mobile data, whereas laptops have not historically had that except on high end business models. Devices are pretty useless to the average person without the internet, so in places with poor connectivity laptops end up being useless.

OLPC also suffered from durability issues (repairs required sending the laptop back to the US, IIRC?) and cost issues (they never did hit the $100/unit price point)

Even Raspberry Pi leverages the scale of Broadcom chips, which also get used in Android phones

Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021

#185

I think one of the smartest things Apple did was open physical stores and not depend on carrier stores and Best Buy. I've often wondered why their competitors don't do the same thing? Why isn't there a Samsung store a block away from every Apple store? Having a physical location for purchases, repairs, and support is why I always recommend Apple devices when somebody who isn't super technical asks me what to buy. Mic…

Samsung does have its stores in my country (Czechia). Very much inspired by Apple, touting flagship phones and all.

yep. Brazil too. AFAIK there is only one Apple store in Sao Paulo (though there are Apple resellers too) but Samsung has stores in virtually all high end malls. Xiaomi had a pilot store here too.

The context is that Brazil has high import duties on manufactured goods. Apple doesn't manufacture domestically. Samsung does.

Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...with only a 13% share of units. > Asian countries with a long history of promoting market share, access to information, and knowledge transfer at the expense of short-term profit. Apple is the king of parasitic technological and scientific knowledge rentierism and obfuscation, as well as king in exploitation. it's neo-imperialism at it's most 'refined'. profits are surplus value extracted from workers, including…

>don't think it's so bad? Vijay Prashad: "iPhone workers today are 25 times more exploited than textile workers in 19th Century England" [4] One thing I love about studying history is that you can dismiss claims like that immediately.

But if you did you couldn't. The ratio of wages to profit made on the item is way higher for iPhones. The quote is literally true. Textile mills in 19th century England operated with comparatively pedestrian profit margins and factory wages were a much higher proportion of expenses. It's estimated that the assembly costs of an iPhone are in the 20-50 dollar range, the profit margin is in the 300+ dollar range, clearly the ratio is much higher than in any textile mill.

Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple certainly was the winner of Huawei being pushed out of the USA market. Now they can continue slowly issuing premium features their competition had years ago, like the macro lens in the new iPhone 13. IMO, if Huawei had remained, high-end hardware would have entered a race to the bottom, and Apple would have been the biggest loser, we can't have that.

Sorry but your comment made me laugh. Apple (a company that never publishes or leads with their tech specs) would be the biggest loser if Huawei stayed in the market. That Huawei that never reached 2% (or even 1%) mobile marketshare in the US

Apple has never reached double digits in term of desktop market share, but that hasn't stopped them from releasing a new Macbook every year.

Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021

#188
post #18

...with only a 13% share of units. That is, all other vendors together sold 87% of units, but earned only a combined 25% of industry-wide profit. The vast majority of those other vendors are companies headquartered in Asian countries with a long history of promoting market share, access to information, and knowledge transfer at the expense of short-term profit. They might be making less money willingly to grow/mainta…

it’s been like this for a long time (in fact, they used to have ~90% of profits on ~10% of share), which is why apple has the market cap it does. apple has a differentiation strategy, which explicitly goes after fatter profits rather than volume. the handset market is so large however, that apple can still have plenty of volume (100 million units/year) to drive down cost with economies of scale.

>it’s been like this for a long time

Yes. It has been like that since the day iPhone was launched. Arguably the whole (modern) Smartphone Market history.

So I am kinda surprised to see some of the reaction here. And it was easy in the old days when iPhone was in Financial Segment with ASP and unit volume. Now it is hard to judge without those Data. And no where on the site do they mention how they calculated the profits.

Also worth mentioning Apple used to make 95%+ if not more than 100% profits because other vendors were losing money.

Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021

#189
post #153
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most regular users want as many features as they can get, for a reasonable price point. And Samsung is king in that market – their A series phones have a huge sales volume. Some users can afford real premium phones. And Samsung's offerings mostly just kinda suck software wise, even when the hardware is decent. Techies know this and have a huge variety of stock Android alternatives to choose from (which, somehow, cont…

This is just... wrong. I mean, I don't know what bubble you're living in, but my bubble is not like this. Every single person I've ever met, except one, uses either an iPhone or a Galaxy. Probably a sample size of 100 people. The one exception uses a Pixel, and he's a software engineer. The reason why I'm confident enough in saying you're wrong, is because my experience tracks with US smartphone shipment metrics. App…

>Bluntly: Nerds use Pixel devices. Legacy from the Nexus days. Most people wouldn't even know what a Pixel is.

I don't know about that. At least in my city, I know more people with Pixels than Galaxy phones. Granted, I can count the Android users on one hand and about 90 percent of my phonebook is iPhones so who knows.

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