Samsung’s smartphone profits have been taking big hits over the past year and that means Apple has become just about the only smartphone vendor in the world whose phones make significant profits. For a long time, Apple and Samsung ruled supreme as the world’s only two consistently profitable smartphone vendors but new data from Canaccord Genuity suggests Apple is now the only one left in the driver’s seat.
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As flagged by Barron’s, Canaccord’s newest numbers show that Apple alone accounted for an insane 93% of smartphone profits, whereas it accounted for a comparatively small 75% of all smartphone profits in Q4 2015. Interestingly, Samsung accounted for as much as 41% of all smartphone profits as recently as the first quarter of 2014 before taking a steep dive down to 18% in the third quarter and just 9% in the fourth quarter.
What has to make this particularly discouraging for other smartphone vendors is that not one of them is stepping in to fill Samsung’s shoes. According to Canaccord’s analysis, HTC, BlackBerry, LG and Lenovo all had 0% shares of smartphone profits in Q4 while Microsoft lost money on its smartphones and posted a -2% share of profits.
So with Samsung stalled for the time being, there’s pretty much nothing stopping Apple from eating up every piece of profit in the smartphone market. When your smartphone business is doing that well, you really don’t need to worry about having a lower market share than Android or anyone else.
