iPhone sales may have declined for three consecutive quarters, but the latest data from research firm Strategy Analytics suggests Apple is unsurprisingly still doing exceptionally well in the smartphone market.
Apple captured a record 91% of profits in the worldwide smartphone market in the third quarter, or $8.5 billion of the overall $9 billion in profits recorded by all vendors combined, according to Strategy Analytics.
Apple's biggest competitor Samsung was nowhere to be found on the list, as Chinese smartphone makers Huawei, Vivo, and OPPO took the second, third, and fourth spots respectively with between 2.2% and 2.4% of profits.
"Apple’s ability to maximize pricing and minimize production cost is hugely impressive and the iPhone continues to generate monster profits," said Linda Sui, Director at Strategy Analytics. "Huawei, Vivo and OPPO are the next three most profitable smartphone vendors globally this quarter, but they are still a long way behind Apple."
Apple's profit margin is impressive given no other smartphone maker generated more than $200 million in profits during the quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. Apple's share of profits was some 40× larger than its closest competitor.
iPhone sales declined on a year-over-year basis in the second, third, and fourth quarters of the 2016 fiscal year, after rising only marginally during the first quarter, which makes Apple's record-breaking smartphone profits even more impressive.
BMO Capital Markets analyst Tim Long previously estimated Apple captured 103.6% of smartphone industry profits in the third quarter. Long's estimate factors in companies that lost money during the quarter, placing Apple above 100%.
Apple really is rudderless these days. Blowing billions of dollars on hair brained driverless car projects, acquiring headphone companies, selling ridiculous gaudy $20K watches....
I love Apple, I have owned every iPhone ever made, but it's sad to watch them try to turn in to a fashion/accessory brand and completely losing focus on what they do best. It's absolutely disgusting that they only JUST this year increased the base model iPhone from 16GB to 32GB. They should have done that years ago. It just goes to show that Apple cares more about profits than anything else, even at the expense of their long term brand.
The future of tech is AI. Apple should be starting gigantic research initiatives in the field of AI instead of wasting time with gimmicky watches and car projects. Apple has done an excellent job on making a truly impressive CPU/GPU for the iPhone (the A10 is amazing), and I wish they would focus more on the raw tech rather than trying to make their phones & laptops even more thinner and prettier.
7) This profit-first mentality has worked for Apple for decades, as it has for every other company ever...
Completely wrong, when Apple focused on profits-first and vision/innovation second, they got obscenely greedy and nearly killed Apple in the 90s. Blackberry focused on profits, rested on laurels and forgot to innovate, move forward, and died. Vision/innovation has to be first, then profits will follow. Steve Jobs described the demise of Apple in the 90s:
“they cared about making a lot of money… they got very greedy and instead of following the original trajectory of the original vision which was to make this thing an appliance and get this out there to as many people as possible, they went for profits, and they made outlandish profits for about 4 years, one of the most profitable companies in america for 4 years, and what that cost them was their future, because what they should have been doing was making rational profits…”
See minute 39
Steve then came back at the end of the 90s and saved Apple by innovating with iMac, digital hub, changing the world with iPod, then profits followed.
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Top Rated Comments
And they will all be unapologetically thin.
I love Apple, I have owned every iPhone ever made, but it's sad to watch them try to turn in to a fashion/accessory brand and completely losing focus on what they do best. It's absolutely disgusting that they only JUST this year increased the base model iPhone from 16GB to 32GB. They should have done that years ago. It just goes to show that Apple cares more about profits than anything else, even at the expense of their long term brand.
The future of tech is AI. Apple should be starting gigantic research initiatives in the field of AI instead of wasting time with gimmicky watches and car projects. Apple has done an excellent job on making a truly impressive CPU/GPU for the iPhone (the A10 is amazing), and I wish they would focus more on the raw tech rather than trying to make their phones & laptops even more thinner and prettier.
“they cared about making a lot of money… they got very greedy and instead of following the original trajectory of the original vision which was to make this thing an appliance and get this out there to as many people as possible, they went for profits, and they made outlandish profits for about 4 years, one of the most profitable companies in america for 4 years, and what that cost them was their future, because what they should have been doing was making rational profits…”
See minute 39
Steve then came back at the end of the 90s and saved Apple by innovating with iMac, digital hub, changing the world with iPod, then profits followed.