Samsung ships two smartphones for every one Apple sells We already knew smartphone shipments have never been higher, and now we know that, in Q3 at least, the beneficiary is Samsung. According to ABI Research and Strategy Analytics, market watchers both, the Korean chaebol - a multi-industry colossus - took more than a third of the market. According to SA, Samsung’s share was 35.2 …
Indeed. Samsung has more models, so it can appeal to more people. Apple prefers to limit itself, sell fewer, but make more money. Both are valid approaches, but Samsung's is clearly more successful for now.
Not that I'd have one - Samsung's not a brand I trust.
Oh, were for art thou, Nokia?
Apple are still selling the 4, the 4S and the 5 (and then 3 different memory sizes for the 5).
Sure, Samsung have 'more' phones, but the Apple range above covers £319->£699 - so I'd definitely say they have a range of phones and there's a pretty large overlap in prices between Samsung and Apple Smart phones.
i.e. They're both fighting over the same section of the market (with Samsung also covering the cheaper end, Apple's ignoring for now).
Samsung have phones like the Galaxy Y and Ace which are still classified as smartphones yet are far cheaper than anything Apple has to offer, you even can pick them up on PAYG if you want.
So unless Apple have a radical change of strategy they can't do a thing against Samsung. You'd probably ask why Apple would want to change their strategy. They probably wouldn't, but that doesn't matter to people with lots of money who buy their shares.
Don't know if they come in the exact pack you're talking about, and in fairness a brief scout didn't turn up a currently avaiable iphone 5 deal like that (although O2 appear to have such a thing, if you try and get one it says "All stock of iPhone 5 on Pay & Go has been snapped up" - yeah, right....)
However, both iPhone 4S and S3 can be had on PAYG deals with various carriers at CPW, they can also be had from the 3 website too. I don't think the Reg would appreciate me putting unpaid ad links up, but they aren't hard to find.
i.e. They're both fighting over the same section of the market (with Samsung also covering the cheaper end, Apple's ignoring for now).
I think this is the critical aspect here.
I suspect that the sub £300 end of the market is considerably more than just twice the size of the top end of the range.
This kind of analysis is pointless because the phones being shipped are not equivalent. If you want to claim that one company is beating the other, then you need to compare them on like-for-like range of phones, and further, on phones that are earning the company a like-for-like profit margin. Samsung could sell 100x the number of phones, but if they're not making any money off 99% of them then such a statistic is merely obfuscating the real facts.
As the article says, the more interesting fact here is the Samsung's success is cannibalising the Android market, not eating into Apple's sales.
Sure compare like with like, but price isn't what we should be looking at - that just rewards Apple for being overpriced. Apple's first iphone couldn't even run apps, putting it on the same level as dumb (not even feature) phones - so high price doesn't mean it should only be compared to the same priced phones from Samsung.
Neither fact is more real. If we want to know who is most popular, then sales are what's important, not profit. The only people who care about profit are shareholders.
"As the article says, the more interesting fact here is the Samsung's success is cannibalising the Android market, not eating into Apple's sales."
Or rather, Samsung are more successful, and Apple are completely failing to take any of the growing market. You phrase this as if suggesting that nothing's changed, but the fact is that Android as a whole is still growing, massively more popular over IOS (which is struggling to catch up to the installed userbase of old Symbian, a year after it was ditched for WP by Nokia). (And come on now - if instead Android's share was split evenly among dozens of companies, you'd be here praising Apple for having more sales as an individual company, rather than by platform.)
Let's say in the next quarter, RIM leaps from 4 million to 25 million smartphones. That is still lower than Apple's 27 million smartphones. So who is winning? Obviously RIM, because what counts is the trend. RIM is now the guy to watch out for, even if it sold less than Apple in absolute numbers (25 million versus 27 million).
What about the REAL world? In the past 1.5 years, Apple went from 15 million to 27 million, and Samsung went from 8 million to 57 million. Do you see what is happening? Capiche?
Of the 57 million Samsung phones, perhaps about one-third are quality smartphones, or about 20 million. So even if that falls short of Apple's 27 million, it's still the trend that counts.
I doubt that Apple is too worried about the number of units it ships. It has a whole different revenue stream that Samsung could only dream about. So for Apple, shifting hardware is merely a means to a (30% royalty/tax) end - whereas Samsung has to make all its profit from flogging kit, where margins aren't that great.
"whereas Samsung has to make all its profit from flogging kit, where margins aren't that great."
Samsung phones come with a Samsung app store, book buying, magazine buying, music, video etc
Not the same scale as Apple's obviously, but if they keep selling twice as many phones there's still some money to be made apart from hardware.
Just a minor corrrection to your post. Had you read the article properly (or were you using the inferior iPad Mini with it's low res screen?) you would have noticed the following.
It wasn't Samsung shouting it was "ABI Research and Strategy Analytics, market watchers both"
Furthermore it also stated that "Samsung’s share was 35.2 per cent, achieved by shipping 56.9 million smartphones." And went on to say "the twice the 26.9 million units Apple shipped"
Note the use of the word shipped.
Really, you must try harder
"Bottom line is revenue and profit"
Actually only profit is bottom line. Revenue is top line. The metaphor comes from accounting, and has a precise meaning despite people's tendency to use it loosely to mean 'the most important thing' or suchlike - a precise meaning that can't help being highlighted when you use the metaphor to talk about some actual accounts. The idea is that you start off with the sales figures (revenue), which form the top line of the income statement and basically mean bugger all unless you’re in some sort of ‘biggest company by sales’ competition. Then you go down the income statement removing various types of expense, thereby stating various kinds of profit – gross profit, ebit, ebidta etc - until finally you get to net profit, literally the bottom line of the income statement, which hopefully (if there hasn’t been too much accounting jiggery-pokery) is reasonably representative of how much cash is available at the end of the year for the owners to buy more pies.
Considerably more likely than you imagine!
Stuffing the channel to pump up shipped figures is a common short term strategy to pump up figures and feed moron journalists to get print inches, which has a downside when the product does not get sold to a consumer. The products then go somewhere like "crazy joe's bargain basement outlet store" or perhaps they are quietly returned to the supplier and crushed and turn up as a write off of unused parts for phones no longer being manufactured or shhipped (yes, I am looking at you Nokia).
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actually Apple uses both terms,Shipped and Sold., which is rather confusing, but the difference is also pretty minimal. Neither Samsung nor Apple ship more than their supply chain is interested in doe to sales demand. This Shipped vs Sold is a total red herring and rather pointless without independent verification, which you won't be able to get from either party. All we have are the figures that each party supplies without explaining if those include warranty replacements, refurbished items or B-stock, let alone how much is being held by retailers as stock. Regardless, that is a lot of smartphones and both can be proud of their achievement.
Actually you're both wrong. If we're going to do the male every-analogy-is-a-car thing then Samsung make Fords, Peugeots etc, and Apple make VWs, BMWs etc.
There is a cross-over in price at the top end of Samsung and bottom end of Apple and they generally serve different purposes. Some people just want to get from A to B and occasionally stick a bean-can exhaust on the back, some people will pay more for a different experience.
When it comes to cars I buy Fords and Peugeots - driving is a functional thing for me. When it comes to tech I want productivity and Apple kit does that for me. In the same way that some people buy high-end Fords, some people buy high-end Samsungs and pay as much for their phones as people do for Apple phones.
Is there any chance we can one day draw the line under this pseudo-religious arguing and just move on beyond this playground crap?
Actually Samsung cars are essentially Nissans - although these days it's Renault which owns the bulk of Samsung's Automotive Division.
Lets see...Automotive company who's products struggle to last 3 years without catastrophic failure partners with technology company who's products struggle to last 3 years without....
Woohoo! Synergy! Someone better tell the PHB...
For that size of car it absolutely is a status symbol, an example of good lightweight efficient design along with its sister car the Mazda 2. Prior to that most cars were getting fatter with each new generation. And probably cost Ford a great deal to develop, they can''t afford to have low-volume style reliability and quality problems when they are making millions of them.
Perhaps it's time for Apple to consider a Lite version of the iPhone.
Cheaper chipset, less powerful processor... perhaps based on the 3GS
Perhaps forgo the pre-installed memory and go for an SD Card.
Ah, SCREW IT! Removable battery too!
It makes financial sense, but it's NEVER gonna happen.
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*The sound of most ElReg readers not giving a fuck....
All that shows is how much more Apple charge for the same thing.
And I'd go with Samsung makes everything from Skodas to BMWs, Apple makes BMWs minus the sunroof, ABS and on-board computer and fits a platinum gear-knob and Kobe-skin seats, puts a square opening on the petrol filler cap and charges accordingly.
I thought I would check out my local phone shop for prices, the cheapest Apple phone was going for £28 per month on contract the phone was free and the latest 5 was £66 per month plus £89 for the phone. Compare that to the Samsung phone the flagship S3 cost £28 per month phone is free, looking further into this I found that all Samsung phones are free on contract. To get an Apple phone free you have to pay some big money per month for it, I could go on but its clear who is making the real money here. The difference here is that all the different Samsung phones have different versions of Android onboard and work very differently, Apples 5 & 4 gives the same user experience.
Still I love the S3 phone though
If you want to know the actual price of any given phone, look at prices in countries which are totally free of the subsidy/contract/carrier lock-in. In these countries, a phone is like any other gadget and it has a price based on all the regular factors that determine the price of a product in a free competitive market.
Last time I looked, the price being charged in the free market for flagship phones from Samsung and Apple was quite close.
I have never owned a contract phone, ever. And I have lived in quite a few countries over the years.
Wow! I must blitz off an email to Heinz, tell them that Daddy's sauce outsells it. And whilst they mightn't think much of Crosse & Blackwell beans, the real enemy is those Tesco Value Beans in that godawful blue and white stripy tin.
Or maybe I'll not tell them at all, just in case you're talking shite.
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