As ever ...
Apple sales are compared to Samsung shipments
Samsung has extended its lead over Apple by shifting considerably more smartphones than its adversary during the first quarter of 2013. The South Korean giant also managed to ship 56 per cent more mobes in those three months than it did in the same period a year ago. Among the world’s top five smartphone vendors, Apple - …
Okay, when we hear a story about Samsung burning millions of surplus mobes, or burying them in the desert, or completely halting all future production of their hardware, then I will accept that there is a difference.
Until then lets just accept that all those shipped devices are as good as sold.
@RusselMciver
"all those shipped devices are as good as sold"
Er, no, they're not, not when all manufacturers are still seeing significant quarter by quarter increases in sales. Samsung are gearing up for a launch of the S4. Shipped covers pre-stocking for future releases and will include figures committed to be shipped by the end of the quarter. Additionally there are a very great many phones that hang around on mob shop shelves throughout the world. Many suppliers will have a returns contract, so can return stock that doesn't sell. So the net effect is Samsung are showing a significant dollop of the following quarters projected sales increase in the previous quarter as compared with Apple and when they have a big release about to arrive, their figures telegraph a significant dollop of that future into the present quarter.
In addition to this, you will never see the breakdown from Samsung of premium smartphone product versus low-margin low-spec product.
This is significant because it is having such a significant effect on the sales value of the customer in each ecosystem and when this is combined with per user usage figures it is clear iOS is, to put it bluntly, winning. Many don't like to hear it, but it is simply undeniable iOS customers are on average worth significantly more to ecosystem partners than Android customers.
A good way to gauge the health of a business is to think of dollars spent as votes of endorsement. Looked at that way, iOS is streets ahead of Android both for the base hardware purchase and for the software ecosystem partners. Any fool can give a product away for free. When charged for product is taken into account, it's clear iOS is doing rather better than Android. There has been a flash adoption of smartphones as the technology has come to break certain key price-points previously only met by feature phones, and this has been a key driver for Android adoption (we are back to the fact Samsung don't give the breakdown for their budget vs Galaxy line) thanks that the fact that it is there and was a practical option in the market place. But in the longer term there is a different, slower burn but more significant adoption pattern that is emerging for iOS. See this AllThingsD article:
http://allthingsd.com/20130426/androids-leaky-bucket-loyalty-gives-apple-the-edge-over-time/
Though it is generally accurate and a good way of looking at things to view dollars spent as votes of endorsement, I fully admit, there are for sure, certain caveats that should be observed regarding this generalisation. For sure, find exceptions can be found. Certainly highly committed customers exist, who aren't prepared to pay for much and so for these customers a lower spend doesn't correspond to a lower level of endorsement. However, remind me again of what the definition of Freetard is?
Your logic is right but facts are wrong. Q4 is always the biggest quarter (take a look at the link below). You could just as easily argue that Samsung's sales would have been even higher except for the stock pumped into the channel in Q4. Or you could just accept it's not a perfect comparison but the difference is large enough that no matter what, Samsung sold more phones than Apple.
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24085413
Yes, I didn't put that well. When I said quarter by quarter increases, I meant in comparison with the quarter from the previous year and should have phrased it as such. But I didn't claim Apple have sold more phones than Samsung.
Samsung haven't sold more phones to committed customer's who are the most valuable market segment though and that's easily demonstrated and the link I provided demonstrates that through sticking with higher value customers, Apple are still managing to slowly and effectively grow their constituency, which also has the secondary effect of squeezing others in the industry into the segments with lower and lower margin customers. To change strategy and try to cater for the broadest possible market would be stupid of them because it would mean compromising what is a highly effective and lucrative business strategy.
The best counter argument is that the ecosystem winner takes all. However I don't think things are the same today as during the 90's when gaining a market-share edge meant shutting out all competition. We are no longer slaves to file formats and file formats are these days almost all file formats are entirely and effectively cross platform. So I don't think that is really a concern, other than that Google, Apple, Amazon need to effectively compete on their won terms.
How long until Samsung drop Android - they look like they are moving that way with the S4. Fact is a huge number of users get an Android phone but do not know or care that it's Android - it's just better than the last Nokia / candy bar they had before.
We see a lot of 'bad' news about Apple yet they shipped MORE phones - sure their market share has slipped as they do not try and sell a £50-100 phone and make no money on it and the market for smartphones is growing at the low end as people upgrade from old non-smartphones.
Indeed. Android has replaced the crappy feature phones at the mid to low end of the market as the default phone option. That gives it massive market share, but this is the low margin market where the manufacturers are lucky to make a profit at all. Not the market you want to go after, unless you want to shout "market share up! revenues up! But we made a loss."
You can see the "real" smartphone market numbers if you look closely. One good measure is app usage - if you buy a phone as a smartphone (and not a feature phone replacement) you use apps a lot. The figures here still show apple ahead, especially if you look at the financial numbers - iOS apps make way more money. (And people wonder why WWDC sold out so fast?)
"We see a lot of 'bad' news about Apple yet they shipped MORE phones - sure their market share has slipped as they do not try and sell a £50-100 phone and make no money on it and the market for smartphones is growing at the low end as people upgrade from old non-smartphones"
A great point, funny how the article is never headlined "Apple fail to achieve greatest market share with non-mass-market product".
It wont be long till samsung drop android. I sell mobiles, and just had a training session on the S4. One of my collegues asked why the S4 could use google music, and why google allowed it. They didnt realise that the S4 was android. Which these days with "S-this", and S-that" isnt that surprising. They have started to move away already
"Indeed, I mean, they only sold 37 million iPhones, the only reason they don't call them "bespoke" is to avoid being sued by the tailors at Savile Row"
OR because they are made by the thousands in a Chinese sweatshop!!!
Do you even know what *bespoke* means??? *slaps forehead*
I don't understand why Apply "will need to expand deeper" into new markets.
Marketshare doesn't immediately equal success or profitability. It just means the number of people using your product. It's just a statistic.
If the cost of being in those new markets outweighs the profit from each product sold, then having the largest marketshare is going to be detrimental.
But then again, I guess Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston wouldn't be in a job if people realised this.
It's all about risk, market share at the low-end with loss making handsets should only be for a short time period before the drug dealer pushing hard drugs methodology kicks in, get'em hooked on the cheap/free in the hope that they will move onto the harder stuff through addiction (high end more profitable phones). It's either that or you make sure your high end products have enough of a margin to offset the low-end products losses. Either way it's always a gamble, sometimes you need to take a punt though.
It's easy to sell phones when you are cheap / making little money on them / giving them away - I've seen offers of free tablets with a phone etc. etc. Would be interesting to see actual usage figures and 'installed base' figures - last time I saw the web usage on iDevices was much, much higher pointing to people actually using them (of course people use them for other things but web is easier to measure and pretty universal).
But really there is a natural limit to how much you can polish an OS or Phone. The original wasn't actually revolutionary, the bits had just become economic and they added some 1950s Dieter Rams Style.
A lot of Jobsian Hype.
So they are reaching a natural plateau and without someone with MORE Reality Distortion Field and More vision than s. Jobs they can only make changes that make it worse (i.e. Apple Maps).
So far to soon to buy the shares. They will eventually be 1/10th of the peak 2012.
It's very easy to forget what was arguably the most revolutionary feature of the (original) iPhone - the data tariff. The hardware (and OS) as you say were the result of a longer process of evolution (and convergence between mobile devices and computers) but leveraging the expected popularity of the phone to force AT&T (and later the other networks) to offer 'unlimited' data (or at least, a lot more data for a lot less than they previously had done) was what allowed the smartphone industry to take off. An iPhone-like device on the data tariffs which existed before the iPhone would have simply been too expensive for most people to really use.
Excellent point.
But that was Marketing clever, not innovation. Once that is out of the Bottle it helps every gadget maker. I had a Nokia Communicator N9210 Fortunately the office paid for it; handy being able to send and receive real Faxes as well as real email.
Actually I still can't justify a Mobile Data contract. I have to find a WiFi point when I travel.
It's very easy to forget what was arguably the most revolutionary feature of the (original) iPhone - the data tariff.
Errr, excuse me, but o'er in Europe I was using Web and Walk long before the iPhone debuted. The original W&W was exactly that - unlimited data on all ports.
Then "smartphones" started to pick up, killed off all the real smartphones, and T-Mobile shat themselves. Bye bye unlimited data.
What Apple actually need to do, IMHO, as actually release a product that's actually an innovative repackaging of an existing concept again. The iPhone? Not the first smartphone. But well designed, well marketed, and ultimately desirable. Same for the iPad.
Or, you know, they could release something that is genuinely innovative. I fear they're going to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory if this trend of incremental upgrade bullshit that they peddled out between iPhones 4, 4S and 5 continues. And that won't be good for anyone. Not even the 'droids. Because as the Android dominance continues, manufacturers will get lazy. It happened with Microsoft and Windows. it will happen again with the Android peddlers. We need competition to keep the market fresh.
And would it kill Apple to give iOS a facelift? Seriously?
But then, what do I know? I'm not a Strategy Analytics analyst. I'm just a consumer who knows what he wants.
iPhone 5 is so fast that it's easily still faster than the newest Samsung, despite Samsung's faster chips. This because of better iPhone code. Samsung phones break or fail one-third more often than iPhone. Tests confirm these results on several Web sites. How much better do iPhones have to be to outsell Samsung? Well, it's not a matter of better. When you can buy 2 Samsungs for the price of one, when Samsung counts every phone it ships, wold or not, as sold, it's hard to compare figures. When Samsung lumps toghter cheap phones that baresly qualify as smart with newer phones, and when Apple makes 75 percent of profits from smart phone sales, you have to raise a few red flags.
You have to raise even more red flags when you learn that Samsung is paying a lot of money to bloggers to trash Apple with what amounts to whopping packs of lies and misleading statements.
There's fanboying, and then there's that post. Samsung are the devil, their phones always break, there's a blogger conspiracy, etc, etc.
Knock it off.
I don't even like Android that much (I prefer it to iOS, but then I'd prefer a chainsaw in the shins to iOS), and I can tell you that the S3 is an excellent feature phone. I thought when I got it through work that I'd end up preferring my previous S2, and after quite a lot of time using it.....nope. In fact, I'd say it's better than my Nexus 4, specs be damned. The screen is gorgeous, the system is nippy, the battery life is surprisingly decent.
As a smartphone, they all suck, and I'd rather have an N950 if I could find someone to steal one from, but as a featurephone the S3 kicks ten bells out of anything Apple branded.
Until it goes wrong - colleague returned his Samsung and was told it was typically 21 days turn-around - fancy being without for 3 weeks plus postage time? No - he didn't either so had to go buy a new phone. Apple fault - 20 minutes in one of their stores - job done.
@Greg J Preece
"Apple simply throw new phones at anyone with the slightest issue to get them to go away."
Ha. With deliciously twisted logic great customer service gets transformed into a cynical ploy to reduce workload by getting rid of any customers with a complaint as quickly as possible.
Ha. With deliciously twisted logic great customer service gets transformed into a cynical ploy to reduce workload by getting rid of any customers with a complaint as quickly as possible.
If you're the kind of person that does so little with their smartphone that simply throwing your existing one away and getting a new one is "great customer service", you might be missing the point. (Or you might just be an iPhone user.)
Laptop got an issue? Just throw it away, get a brand new one! That's the responsible thing to do! You won't have to spend days setting everything up again, will you? No chance at all of data loss, ho no. And when the manufacturer reconditions the machine they just took off you, you can totally trust them with the hard drive, right?
Yeah....there' a reason why when I ask for something to be fixed, I want it fixed. And that's to say nothing of the potential environmental repercussions of simply chucking stuff out. A place I know threw out two projectors this week because they were "broken." It took a multimeter, a soldering iron and ten minutes to give us two working projectors.
That's the responsible thing to do! You won't have to spend days setting everything up again, will you?
Lets gloss over that bloated pile of turd that is itunes for the moment...and recall that it does actually allow you to restore the last backup of your old phone (usually made automatically when you plug in the phone) to your new phone. Time to setup new phone...30 minutes tops, and most of the work is done for you. Use icloud for various settings, and it's even simplier. You're hardly going to be spending "days" getting everything back to just the way you want.
Whether you like iOS or not, the restore-old-to-new process is actually quite painless.
@Greg J Preece Clearly you are not an iPhone user as then you would know there is iCloud backup and they start the restore for you in-store. It's painless, very quick and requires no user interaction other than entering your Apple username and password. Also it's pretty ignorant to accuse me of simply chucking stuff out when it is Apple who recycle your defective phone. Check their website, their environmental and recycling policy is there for all too see. They will recycle the parts from phones they have exchanged. So all in all they are simply giving their customers good customer service so yes your logic is plainly twisted and downright wrong.
Get over it.
Look at Samsungs advertising budget for mobile - saw a graph the other day and think it was about 10-11x what Apple spend = desperate.
Are they really that much cheaper - compared a Galaxy S3 and a iPhone 5 at Carphone Warehouse - the same tariff on Three - both phones were £25 per month - the only difference being the iPhone 5 was £99 up front in addition. So over the 2 year contract we are talking an extra £4 per month effectively.
Now imagine you had those 2 phones and them wanted to sell them at the end of the contract - looking at the prices old iPhones actually sell for you would get that £99 back and then some in fact I'm not sure anyone would even buy a 2 year old S3?
Forget about better support from Apple, forget about iOS vs Android, forget about more accessories - but purely on a cost basis there is bugger all difference these days at the higher (profitable) end of the market.
Why do you think Apple has to innovate, especially when the first paragraph of your post is about how they don't innovate?
Also, it's rare that any company makes anything but incremental improvements. Do you also troll on articles about... well, basically any other company that makes any product at all... and complain that they aren't being innovative enough?
As for giving iOS a facelift... meh. For those of us who aren't teenage boys, it's not necessary for our app icons to switch colors every couple of years.
Yes, Samsung has shipped loads and loads of phones. But who is making the lion's share of the profits in the mobile industry, let alone the smartphone one? Yup, still Apple.
Apple has never focused on market share, despite every pundit in the world urging them to. They have little interest in competing with the commoditised cheap and cheerful market. But they sure like the profits in the premium market.
Yes, before the iPod they made a lot of profit from Premium price Macs when IBM was losing money on PCs.
iPod November 2001
Dell took over the top spot of PC manufacturer from Compaq in 2001
Compaq taken over by HP in 2002 (called a Merger)
IBM sold PCs to Lenovo in 2004
Apple was making huge margin on the Macs.
Apple still makes more profit on Macs (as they still command an Apple Premium) than other makers but Mac share is still at Windows Phone levels.
Unless there is a massive culture change in Apple they will still make 20%+ profit on a Niche Phone /Tablet /Mac etc when others make 5%+ profit or a loss in a commodity market.
Whats funny is that this so called analyst, kept going on about percentages rather, than absolutes. You got to compare against the previous year, if Apple is selling more phones in a bigger market, than that means they are making tons of money. They don't need market share, for a companywith what 9% of the desktop pc market, they still make more money than they can spend!
All of their mobiles they sell are high end, unlike samsung that sell both high end and cheap tat to make up their figures. I know whose got 137 Billion in cash and who arent put it that way!
Rehashing existing tech is not going to win you consumer loyalty from anyone but the diehard sheep. Other companies are innovating far more than apple with the current generation of handsets but apple can easily claw that back with something fresh, the only question to me is who's playbook are they going to take note of lol
Apple's phones a very good, but they are becoming boring and ubiquitous.
The wow factor of someone having an iPhone just isn't there nearly everyone has one. In addition, the brand association (Apple= creative, artsy, hipster type) is fading quickly. I think that's why you're seeing the slump. What's keeping Apple dominant are a few things:
1) While boring, apple phones are stable and generally work well.
2) People are locked into their ecosystem- it's the devil they know. Strange since, Apple has been trying to break that spell re: Microsoft.
3) Their app selection is second to none- most major businesses (and lots of minor ones) have an iOS app. Fewer have a Android app, but they're still very respectable. WP8 is lagging in this area.
However, the HTC One and some of the Lumia phones are closing in. If the app ecosystem improves, it could be enough to peel off iphone users.
Here is hoping that somebody like Cyanogen will modify Android to remove all the nasty Google phone home bits and blackhole all the uneeded App communications permissions leaving us with an "open" OS that works and does not suck up data or batteries and is safe and secure. I would GLADLY pay $100 for that privilige especially if it included the best part of Palm Pilot contact management software so I don't have to rely on the "Cloud" and sync contacts and emails direct from my PC and still be able to use standard Android apps.
ALL Current Cell Phone Service Providers, Hardware & Software Manufacturers are Greedy Pfucks.
This needs to change and the solution could be crowdsourced rather easily.
"so I don't have to rely on the "Cloud" and sync contacts and emails direct from my PC"
Which is the mean reason why I stick with my Nokia 808 Pureview Symbian phone. Syncing goes as well using the cloud as over bluetooth or a simple USB-cable. In fact i can even use my phone as a USB stick to boot a PC (with a live linux like Puppy) or transfer files to ANY computer. Sure I don't have a full HD screen in my jeans next to my balls. But that's fine by me. At least that 808 has the best RGB Amoled screen at slightly lower resolution (but with great sunlight legibility) which doesn't suck up most of my phone battery (due to the lower screenresolution but apparently those dumb-customers don't comprehend that!).
And it can do full 2way-callrecording too.
"ALL Current Cell Phone Service Providers, Hardware & Software Manufacturers are Greedy Pfucks"
What do you expect. Apple is just that same apple as those rich creeps from the 80's and 90's and Android is a backdoor for Microsoft to retrieve MSFT-tax (so you might as well buy a genuine WP-device for that matter).
Nothing has changed. Except now we have even more greedy bastards filling their pockets.
why some people rave on about which company is making the most profit.
I guess if you have shares in that company, it is of some importance. For the rest of us, it is irrelevant.
In fact, the only thing I'm interested in is the technical capabilities of the phone's hardware and software, and how much it costs. I may even care a little bit about its appearance, but not enough to affect my decision.
All things being equal if a phone costs more, then that is a negative.
If you regard it as a positive, then in my opinion there is something wrong with you.
"despite shipping more phones"
isn't that the most important thing of doing business?
Fact is Apple shipped more phones this year then previous year so they obviously have more revenue and thus are doing better despite a diminishing (or shifting) marketshare.
IMHO there should be less "marketing bureaus" and more people actually doing something useful. All that dribble about marketshare is fun for accountants and statistics analysts etc... but they add nothing to productivity nor enhance innovation.
"209.5 million units"
Thats an awfull lot no matter what "marketshare" that accounts for. Considering the profit Apple has on each device their doing quite well I guess.
So what's all the fuzz about?
Also the reason why LG is doing better then expected is because they made the current Nexus phone?
(http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/flow/item/17376_IDC_numbers_shows_smartphones_.php)
shows similar numbers from IDC (another one of those useless number crunching firms)
The table shows that actual market share is diminishing for everybody except Samsung and the "others". This "others"-column probably proves that there are now a lot more unknown chinese crapdroid-handset-makers on the market then 2 years ago hence the bigger "others"-marketshare. It also shows that Apple's marketshare is actually quite steady.
This is just another pro-Android anti-everything-else propaganda from El Reg. Perhaps they ought to try to give us real useful and interesting articles instead of this biased crap. It's a far cry for what El Reg used to be. Shame on you!
I'm more interested in a statistic of the profits Microsoft is making from the sale of Android Phones made by OEM's who have a licensing agreement with Microsoft. That is info that is sneaking by under the radar. As for the whole Android versus Apple marketshare/profit discussion, it's true that the Android vendors will have made their profits for most of the year by the time Apple releases the next iPhone. So, if Apple does little more than incrementally upgrade the iPhone 5 with irrellevant upgrades that will only impress a limited number of hard core Apple fans, they will ultimately lose customers to vendors who are producing more compelling phones than Apple and right now, everyone including Blackberry, is producing more compelling phones than Apple. Cook can stick his head in a hole and believe the nonsense he's spouting about his competitors, but he's the only one who believes that nonsense. Customers are proving with their buying choices, that there are better choices out there.