http://www.economist.com/node/21525685
Samsung have for a long time been a bigger player in the smartphone market than they look from their device sales alone.
I have a feeling they'd rather be more profitable though.
As a matter of scale and impact, Samsung accounts for 13% of South Korea's GDP.
I also expect them to surpass Nokia in all phone shipments, too (they already did in smartphones). But it might take a few more quarters. Nokia will transition too slowly to Windows Phone and Meltemi, and it's yet to be seen if they will even see as big success as they did in the past with Symbian. Many have already moved on from Nokia.
With a 'free' 3GS Apple is pretty much competing with Samsung and Android now at every price point.
But an iPhone 3GS still costs around $400, while Android manufacturers can make even $100 phones today. What this means is that the iPhone 3GS will still be sold on an expensive contract, while the "free" Android phones will be even on $10 contracts.
So it will cost them something. Competition is a bitch.
I mean, I'd prefer 'em to be making more money rather than less money, but it's not a great idea to get too emotionally invested in every piece of news about every company you happen to have some money in.
Also, people want their favorite companies to be pitted against their closest competitor and when they emerge victorious, they have a sense of pride about it.
To end, this is very similar to the emacs vs vim or windows vs linux vs mac or the browser competition where people just want to establish their some kind of superiority over the others.
As an app developer I'm more interested in how this top end pans out. I want the consumers who are willing to buy apps, and I want there to be lots of them on one kind of platform so I don't have to do the heavy lifting in making the game consistent across all handsets. I'm not making angry-birds clones that could run on minecraft redstone, so a basic level of GPU+CPU capability is needed.
Samsung's business model promotes the further fragmentation of Android, and I think this will be a bad thing for consumers(read: developers). We'll be back to the days of nokia making a different phone for every conceivable type of person there is, with only nokia or huge studios with the capability to make the umpteen variations required to make the game feel at least comparable across each handset.
If there are 80% of the market using android devices that are underpowered the only winner will be flashlight apps.
The reality is that Apple were the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world for one quarter. It would be more accurate to view the fact that they were (briefly) number one as a blip rather than see it as a major title they lost and something they need to react to.
The 90s house hold computing boom left Apple completely out of the equation, the couldn't compete on any level. Jobs turned that around by competiting where MS couldn't, with hardware and usability (through lock in).
They set out to make the most money. Samsung are a fair distance from achieving that.
It really worries me that there's a new breed of Apple fan that actually believes this.
In reality they set out to build the best device (for affluent, white, middle-aged, American males with a taste for minimalism) and semi-accidentally became fashionable status symbols.
The crowing about making the most money was just fanboy bragging because every other stat they bragged about was slowly being eclipsed by Android. Fanboy rule number one is to make far too big a deal about anything unique about you or your enemy. Some people seem to have latched onto profit margins and run wild with it. This has gotten to the point where I'm half expecting, even here on HN, someone to come along and claim that Samsung "isn't making any money" from selling these phones.
So what do you reckon, what would a perfect smartphone for black, middle-aged American males look like?
How more simple could their model be? Exploit human greed.
I don't really see the problem with claiming a company sets out to make money. But Apple's achievement in this area is nothing short of phenomenal. They've driven component costs down to the point that there's _hundreds_ of dollars of margin on every device. Then they've got the app store. The only firm I can think that does it this well is Nintendo, who even in the days they weren't fashionable were nonetheless very profitable.
That sounds backwards to me.
.
--http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/01/iphone-passes-1-pe...
The month on month rise in sales, for the last year or so, has been spectacular. You can't just keep shipping phones at that pace without selling them, it's simply not realistic to channel stuff on that scale.
The rest of the article is equally shoddy. For example: Chinese phone maker ZTE Corp.’s cheaper handsets helped it take 4.7 percent and overtake Apple for fourth place. Global market shipments climbed 14 percent to 390 million units, according to the researcher.
Apple does not even produce feature phones, so the inclusion of Apple in that paragraph can only be construed as mischievous. It's like saying "Porsche fell to last place in the under-US$20K category".
Exactly.
It's seems unlikely that they would be doing so differently from HTC and ZTE, much smaller players who are doing very well.
I don't know of any comprehensive numbers on the market that I'd trust, but as a snapshot Apple reported $7.3 Billion profit in July (for phones, ipods, ipads + compters etc.) up 80% from last year, while Samsung just announced $2.3 Billion just from smartphones, a yearly increase of over 100%. (This doesn't seem to include money from selling components to other smartphone makers, such as Apple).
http://pic.twitter.com/rIO0siLf
Edit: See also: http://www.asymco.com/hire-me/vendor-bubbles/
Samsung also has tremendous media influence in the nation. The company influences the media by giving or withdrawing advertising, giving scholarships to journalists, or suing the critical media. As a result, their corporate misdeeds get swept under the rug. The company uses the press as a means to control the press rather than sell their products. Samsung accounts for almost one-fifth of the entire nation's GDP. It's no surprise they are the nation's largest advertiser.
Corporate influence in the USA is nothing compared to the influence of the chaebol in Korea.
But is it really a numbers game? Is it quantity over quality? It's no secret that Apple has one of the most loyal fanbases out of any other tech company. Who is clamoring over wanting every new Galaxy smartphone? Who's lining up every time they release a new product?
For those who want to play the numbers game, make sure to play it properly. The iPhone 4s sold 4M shipments during its first weekend. Meanwhile, it took Samsung 55 days to sell 3 million Galaxy S IIs, arguably, their most successful Smartphone yet. Now if Samsung continuously releases new versions of these Galaxy smartphones, which they are, then obviously they will be shipping more.
