Slashdot Mirror
Samsung Beat Apple In Smartphone Shipments, Profit Surges To 2-Year High (thehindu.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier reports speculated this to be true, but now it's official: Samsung has beat Apple in smartphone shipments to lift the company to its most profitable quarter in over two years. The Hindu reports: "Riding on the strong sales of its Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge smartphones, Samsung Electronics on Thursday declared 8.14 trillion won ($7billion) year on-year operating profit -- 18 percent in the second quarter results. Touted as bad news for Apple that saw a 15 percent decline in iPhone sales in its second quarter results announced this week, Samsung saw substantial earnings improvement led by sales of its flagship products such as Galaxy S7 and S7 edge. A streamlined mid-to low-end smartphone lineup also contributed to improved profitability for the company. According to Samsung, it shipped about 90 million handsets in the April-June period with smartphones making up more than 80 per cent of the total, the Korea Herald reported. Samsung's second-quarter smartphone shipments are estimated at about 72 million units, almost doubling Apple's iPhone shipments of 40.4 million units during the same period."
I am very impressed with my S7 Edge. It took me a little time to adjust to the curved screen, but all in all I prefer it to my iPhone 6. If Samsung continues to move forward, and Apple does not step up its game, this could be the the new normal.
The samsung crowd need a new phone every 2 years, while iphones last forever.
But, But, But.... according to this earlier today: https://apple.slashdot.org/sto...
the "iphone" is the most popular product of all time!!!! It is the best thing since sliced bread! It solved all the world's problems! It changed the world! Nothing else existed before it and everything about it was brand new and innovative! The article reads like distorted wet-dream fanclub marketing propaganda, completely ignoring reality and everything that lead up to it and happened after.
Anyway, go Samsung! Nice to have quality choices in a far less walled-in environment.
It's been 9 months since the general availability of Android marshmallow, and yet the Galaxy Tab S still haven't received this update. I understand that most manufacturers these days treat tablets and tablet users as an unwanted bastard child, but the Tab S was basically Samsung's flagship tablet until almost one year ago.
Apple is pricing itself out of the market
Time for a fandroid circle jerk!
SE!! SE!! SE!! AAP!
or just take that shirt off NOW
I think the way it works is you have to buy a new one.
Well, google had this formal (or perhaps informal) agreement with the hardware companies and a promise to the consumers that all Android devices get two years of updates. I am not complaining that you get no update (supposedly it's coming). What I am saying Samsung takes almost like a year to give an update, which is ridiculous. I remember they did the same when rolling out Android 5.0.x (it took almost a year), and then they completely skipped the 5.1 and went for 6.0, which is now almost like a year old.
Samsung's profit from their mobile division is 4.32 trillion won up from 3.89 trillion last quarter. Samsung in 2014 had a quarter where they made 6.43 trillion from mobile. This wasn't that amazing of a quarter. It just shows how bad their 2015 was.
Parent post and TFA made equal amount of sense.
After all, there is a vast difference between a shipment (sending the product to a warehouse or store) and a sale (customer actually purchasing the product).
It's nice that Samsung shipped more phones than Apple, but how many of them are sitting in a stuffed channel, as opposed to sitting in customer hands as a sold item?
Apple only reports actual sales, so until/unless Samsung reports actual sales, TFA means absolutely nothing at all, and looks awfully the same as Microsoft's old Xbox channel-stuffing antics.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Not to take anything away from Samsung, but there's a bit of an apples vs. oranges comparison here (no pun intended). Apple never reports shipments but only reports sales. It would be more useful to compare total Galaxy sales to total iPhone sales. Who knows how many low and mid-end phones Samsung ships which may inflate its totals.
Well, google had this formal (or perhaps informal) agreement with the hardware companies and a promise to the consumers that all Android devices get two years of updates. I am not complaining that you get no update (supposedly it's coming). What I am saying Samsung takes almost like a year to give an update, which is ridiculous. I remember they did the same when rolling out Android 5.0.x (it took almost a year), and then they completely skipped the 5.1 and went for 6.0, which is now almost like a year old.
This. exactly this.
I have the 8.5 Tab S and found a marshmallow ROM for it. Was pretty easy to root and flash it. You should look into it, Samsung wont be updating it.
Good thing they've been keeping the Mac line competitive... Oops
Anyone can spike market share by shipping into channels. Indeed if you have the capacity to overship you either are building too much inventory or too much manufacturing capacity.
But is is none-the-less an interesting indicator of possible sales expectations.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Updates are the exact reason I left Android and I'm not going back until the problem is fixed. My last phone was Android 2.3 when I bought it, and it was only released 6 months before Android 4 came out. I never saw a single update to that phone. And it was an LG with the Google logo engraved on the back, so you think that Google, or LG, or somebody would stand behind the phone and offer updated software. But nope. Not a single update.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Well, when you consider that Apple has done nothing more than change the shade of lipstick on their favorite pig for the last 10 years or so, you'll realize that it had to end sometime.
They tried to do the Apple-style memory cash grab with the S6, and consumers said no thanks. Good to see they learned their lesson. Everyone wins!
Isn't it great when these mega companies make huge profits? Not really. It's only great if they invest that money in R&D. If they are waiting around for someone else to come up with a new idea they can copy then they can go to hell. It's one thing to cut your costs to the bone to compete with innovators, but another to support a worthwhile R&D team that can move the technology forward.
Most of us know who is resting on their laurels and who are pushing the envelope. Amazon, Google, Apple, IBM, Intel and Elon Musk are accumulating patents at a fantastic rate (and a few of them represent real innovation). I don't know where Samsung stands on innovation- please advise.
...omphaloskepsis often...
apple has consistently banked nearly a billion bux a week for years. samsung emerges into profitability that is fractional to apple based on twice the volume?
sorry, but the struggling enterprise here isn't apple. it's samsung.
samsung's biggest weaknesses? android, fragmentation issues, update issues, ecosystem issues, loss of profitable customers to apple. shortly, apple's service revenues alone will put that single segment of the company in Fortune 100 territory.
it's hard to really grasp how successful an outfit apple is. nothing like it in the last 50 years, maybe longer.
not to say samsung is weak. they are a powerhouse and innovative, if a little unfocused and excessively diversified. (they may bidets in one division and world class semiconductors in another.) ....but, they aren't apple. not by a long shot.
Even though Android phones outsell or out-ship iPhones, doesn't Apple still make like 90% of smart phone industry profits? There was a story a year ago highlighting this how their margins are so much higher they still make more money off less phones sold than other vendors.
Do you imply that someone (retail?) is keeping huge stocks of Samsung phones that will not be sold to customers?
I find this unlikely.
What _could_ be the case is that Samsung ships with peeks, and the retailers serve as some kind of inventory buffer. In this case we would see bad quarters before/after a good one. Maybe this effect exists, but I find it equally unlikely to explain a difference of 2x the units...
More and more streaming and financial applications do not work on alternative ROMs. Confirmed with Uverse.app and Cyanogenmod.
The update problem was actually fixed. You just need to buy a Google Nexus device. They get the fastest and the most frequent updates. The way I see it, for the people who care about guaranteed fast security updates, there is only one choice, Apple or Google Nexus. On top of that, the Nexus devices often give a very good on the money spent.
With Tim Cook more worried about promoting homosexuality and parading a freak show of minorities (gay, black, fat) than displaying an hip and organised image, and worrying about the technical flaws, frankly it does not surprise me Android is gaining moment. What does surprise me is the high price of Samsung in Europe. Shave it in half than Apple, and I will buy it.
So clearly in 2016 Samsung is the winner because they had a terrible year in 2015, while Apple is TEH L00zer because they had an incredible 2015.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
supports UFS and microSD
“The new UFS cards are not compatible with the current microSD card socket. However, we have developed a socket design that can support both UFS cards and microSD cards. We are working with different partners in the industry on this integration for next-generation devices.”
#include bier;
Parent post and TFA made equal amount of sense.
After all, there is a vast difference between a shipment (sending the product to a warehouse or store) and a sale (customer actually purchasing the product).
Yeah, this is a commonly quoted 'defence' whenever someone gets sad that Apple are being outsold by . It might be true on occasion that shipment figures are bigger than sales but in general, where do you think these phones are being shipped *to*? Why would anyone buy then if they weren't pretty sure they could sell them on? Shipments equal sales over a reasonable period of time, because if they don't you have a valuable warehouse costing someone a whole boatload of money as the inventory depreciates.
Samsung has been beating Apple in smartphone shipments since 2012.
That's not true. Apple reports a device as sold as soon as the retailer takes shipment. This is standard accounting. Apple "sells" the phone to the retailer not to the end user - except of course phones that are in stock in the Apple Stores.
If you read most of Apple's quarterly financial discussions, they will talk about either number of devices "in the channel" or the change in the number of devices in the channel. Given that number, you can calculate sell through. But that's not the number of devices sold.
(making numbers up for illustration purposes)
If Apple said that sold 1000 phones and they reduced channel inventory by 500. That means 1500 phones were bought by end users. They would have only reported "sales" of 1000 though. The other 500 would have been counted as sales during a prior quarter.
Phones are about the only device where the manufacturer could know when a sale actually reaches a customer because they have to activate the device would Apple. A TV manufacturer, for instance, would have no way of knowing when a TV was bought by a customer.