iOS marketshare slipping?

I love you resorting to hyperbole. No-one here has claimed Apple is doomed, so I'm not sure why you went on that rant. They are doing fine. They are highly profitable. They are losing sales and market-share. Those statement's aren't contradictory.

It's going to be a long time until they become a margin player with smartphones like they are with PCs. And even that isn't guaranteed, they could always turn things around. And even if they do, they'll still be highly influential as they are in the PC market due to the niche market (affluent professionals and affluent status seekers on PC) that they cater to. They'll continue to lose iOS market share because that segment (affluent consumers buying high end smartphones) has mostly been saturated, growth is coming at the bottom end of the market now.

So it's not expected for their smartphone share to increase, what has been surprising is seeing their shipments decrease. When it was just their iOS tablets showing dramatic YoY shipment decreases, it wasn't a big deal as tablets is a very small fraction of shipments compared to their smartphone business. Seeing shipments of iPhones decrease is potentially worrying if it becomes a trend. If it's a one or two quarter thing, then it's no big deal.

Regards,
SB

 

I love your use of "mental gymnastics" , but okay.
"They'll continue to lose iOS market share because that segment (affluent consumers buying high end smartphones) has mostly been saturated, growth is coming at the bottom end of the market now."
The bottom end is not relevant growth if profit is concerned.

Also: iOS tablets never really lost market share. Does Ferrari lose market share if Dacia sells 1 billion cars?
iOS tablets receive software support up to 5+ years. Most android tablets are sub-100 dollar garbage which will never receive a single update. Most Samsung tablets would fall into that category if you don't look at the price tag. An iPad user might buy an Android tablet, but this is a good thing, as they will learn from this and never ever consider android tablet again, maybe even avoiding android phones and android tv's ("Android? the laggy thing that made my tablet garbage after 6 months?")

"Highly profitable" is really misleading if all your competitors combined have less than 10% of profits from an entire market.

 

This shows you do not under the words you are attempting to use.

If company X sell 100 million units and company Y sells 100 million units, they each have 50% share of the market. If company X continues to sell 100 million units, but company Y sells 400 million units then company X now only has 25% share of the market.

Company Y in that case most certainly lost market share. However, they didn't lose any unit sales. While the first is important in gauging how well you are doing relative to the competition, the second is far more important with regards to the health of your company.

When talking about market share, there's various ways financial analysts look at them. Unit share, revenue share, and operating profit share. All of which are important if looked at correctly. Apple do extremely well with operating profit share due to their high ASP selling to the niche mostly affluent market. That's not a bad thing, that's just a statement of the market that Apple targets and does well in.

They've historically done very well due to this as the high end market has historically grown at a similar rate as the mid and low end markets. However, in recent years high end smartphone sales have hit a plateau and there is no longer much growth there. Hence, Apple losing market share WRT unit sales rapidly while losing market share WRT operating profits and revenue more slowly. Even that wasn't too worrying as shipments of iPhones continued to increase. However, even that is now in question as we've seen shipments of iPhones start to decrease. It may be just a blip or it may not be, we won't know for a few more quarters.

Financially (what we've been talking about) it doesn't matter a single bit of X product receives 5 years, 10 years or no years of support, except as it relates to the cost of operations. IE - it's a cost associated with a product but isn't reflected in the cost of each individual unit that is sold.

Finances and corporate health (which is what their financials reflect) can be derived purely from the financial filing of each individual company if they are a publicly traded company.

Yes, for a rather meaningless 1 financial quarter as I pointed out above. Or do you want to just ignore that Samsung averages over 2 billion USD operating profits per quarter from their Android business except for that one cherry picked quarter where they only made 8.7 million USD operating profit.

This is starting to get rather ridiculous.

Regards,
SB

 

It has been >90% for years, look it up. But even if it was less, lets say 60% (which it is absolutely not btw), 60% of all profits with less than 20% marketshare still makes all your competitors look like complete fools

"Market share" is skewed anyway. For example people to this day can still use an iPhone 5, both user experience as well as securely. The same cannot be said about a Galaxy S3. Galaxy S3 owners are much more likely to have upgraded in the past 5 years.

 

Sure they used to be over 90%, but that was quite a few years ago. It hasn't been that way in quite a while now. And depending on the quarter, it fluctuates between 50-70% for iOS. No-one is going to argue that iOS devices don't make a lot of profit. But they make a lot of profit from a relatively small group of people (globally). As I keep saying their target market is affluent individuals. They don't care about people that don't have a lot of money to spend. Much like Mercedes or BMW.

Again as I said, it's nowhere near being over 90% but is much greater than their 12.5% unit share.

Regards,
SB

 

73% Q1 2012 https://arstechnica.com/business/20...handset-profits-as-smartphone-sales-shoot-up/
92%. Q1 2015 http://www.androidauthority.com/apple-smartphone-industry-profits-624763/
90+% Q2 2015 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...o-why-do-other-smartphone-makers-even-bother-
95% Q3 2015 http://www.androidauthority.com/apple-has-95-of-smartphone-profits-656093/
103.6% Q3 2016 http://fortune.com/2016/11/04/apple-smartphone-profits/

 

One way to measure market share could be to count how many units of devices that are capable of making text and phone calls you sell. Another way could be how much your devices are actually used.

I think Apple "score" higher in the latter.

 

Apple's having some big problems with innovative ideas and stagnation of product development, but anyone who thinks a company with these margins that is sitting on over $200 billion in cash is going to quickly die off must not remember Microsoft a few years ago. Plus, I'll take their % of profits over any amount of unit sales every day.

 

Thanks for those links. I had forgotten that operating profit share doesn't go negative, so companies that are making a loss boost the apparent share of companies that are making a profit. Easily misunderstood by people who don't understand how it's used. It's vastly different from calculating market share based on revenue or units sold, but does have a purpose as revenue and units sold don't give an idea on profitability of a company. It's also why it's called operating profit share versus anything related to market share.

I don't use this myself. For my personal financial calculations companies that make a loss go into negative share versus boosting the share numbers of companies making a profit. It's a bit more representative of the health of various companies, IMO. So in a case where Apple would have 9 billion USD in profits and Samsung 2 billion USD in profit and everyone else making a loss, for me, Apple would have 82% of available profits while Samsung would have 18% of available profits. The other companies would have varying shares of losses. IE - it's not possible for a company to have over 100% of available profit the way I calculate things unlike with how things are calculated for operating profit share where a company making a loss can thus boost a company making a profit over 100%.

Regards,
SB

 

Don't think and guess, instead check the data of what ppl are actually using, eg to go on the internet
http://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile etc
Samsung 33.11%
Apple 19.45%

Android 71.98%
Apple 19.45%

 

How do you know that the web sites they measure are applicable for the larger market. Surveys can always be wrong.

 

Don't think and guess, check out the faq. Samples originate from 2,500,000 sites around the globe.

Cheers

 

There are more than 2500000 sites on the internet. It is a good data point but it might not represent the whole user base.