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Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3%
mrspoonsi writes "Engadget reports: Smartphone market share for the third quarter...as you'd imagine, the world is still Android's oyster. Strategy Analytics estimates that the OS has crossed the symbolic 80 percent mark, reaching 81.3 percent of smartphone shipments by the end of September. Not that Google was the only company doing well — Nokia's strong US sales helped Windows Phone grow to 4.1 percent of the market, or nearly double what it had a year ago."
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While their phone is inferior, it is "good enough" for all they need to do
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but mostly because they see that their cheap phone can do EVERYTHING my iPhone can do at a quarter of the price.
So with that last sentence you're saying it's superior to your iPhone....
You're conflating marketshare and sales volume. If your sales volume goes down, so does your marketshare* but the inverse is not true. Your sales volume can be increasing - and with it your profits - while your marketshare declines, simply because other companies are now selling products in your sphere. As long as volume is good and your margins are good, you keep making money.
This is why Apple continued to be profitable in the days when all it was selling was iMacs and Powerbooks to a tiny portion of the market: they made money on every unit sold and the number of units they sold was enough for them to operate. This is why Apple's balance sheet was at its healthiest in the period when its smartphone marketshare was declining most rapidly: there was a boom on, and their volumes were increasing spectacularly even as their share shrank.
I'd be more concerned about all the phone companies who are making losses every quarter on their devices, despite growing market share. If you're selling 10% of the world's smartphones and you're losing $100 per device sold you need to turn that around or you are up the creek.
*Unless the whole market is shrinking, but that wasn't the case for Nokia or Blackberry
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
These days it's the opposite. The Nexus 5 beats the iPhone 5S in pretty much every area. Better screen, NFC, wireless charging, full 1080p video output, better camera, and arguably better software. Yet it costs half the price.
At one point you could reasonably argue that it was worth paying extra for an iPhone, but these days unless you are already locked in I think it's going to be hard to justify paying double for an inferior or at best equal product.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yeah, from my perspective I can't help but to notice the huge boner most people on internet have towards market share and mainstream market acceptance, regardless if it's for smartphones, computers, game consoles and accessories or services. People just seem to forget that business are about making money. Having a huge share may have some help with it, but that is not always true.
Depends on whether you are thinking as an investor or consumer I guess. I find it puzzling when consumers have a huge boner for the extreme profit margin a manufacturer is extracting from them ;)