The WSJ makes a gripping observation on how the Research in motion’s Blackberry and the Apple iPhone manage heavy margins without actually capturing a gigantic pie of the marketshare like Nokia. With just 1% of the mobile market share in terms of sales, Apple manages to take away 20% of profits from the industry. WOW!
Very recently we heard that low-end phones would enjoy a 24% compound annual growth rate by 2014. But here the problem is that these phones do not allow other avenues of monetization that the RIM and iPhone have explored. Carrier tieups, enterprise services, app stores, mobile internet etc are real things and are gaining increasing importance in any mobile companies bottomline. This shows why the Apple iPhone and they accounted for approximately 38% of the cellphone industry’s total operating profit in 2008 while only representing 3% of total unit sales.
The estimates by Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff show that Apple and RIM will together takeaway 58% of mobile markets profit share by 2009 end. Thats scary. Combined with the comments that I heard today about ‘Symbian and Windows Mobile’ becoming extinct … The industry is poised very interestingly at the moment.
