It would be shocking to discover that Samsung didn't sell more smartphones than Apple, because Samsung competes in many additional markets that Apple does not. The cheapest iPhone you can buy new without a contract costs around $500; the cheapest Samsung smartphone you can buy new without a contract is about $75.
I don't understand why people are so worried about how many phones Apple sells vs. Samsung. Apple doesn't need to "beat" samsung, there's plenty of room in the market for 2 major powers.
I think people aren't annoyed at Samsung selling more phones than Apple. But you have to compare (no pun intended) apples with apples. Obviously Samsung will beat Apple globally they simply make more variety of phones and at different price and value points. Now smartphone to smartphone how are they doing? And are shipped phones the same as sold devices. Unless I am mistaken I am of the impression that Apple reports sales volume. I have no problem being corrected if I am wrong. Also many of these reports by these analysts are bias pro or against whose advertising pays their salaries. To quote Joe Friday 'just the facts ma'am.' Even if the good ship Apple isn't on top.
Don't know why we make these comparisons anyways. Samsung shipped 83 million + smartphones how much of those are real sales. Competition is good but so called research experts depending on their bias throw all these numbers out there. And someone can correct me, I'd like to see actual sales numbers or did I miss something.
There is no regulation that any company is required to do so.
The millions of mobile phones reported by Samsung are as shipped into the partner distribution system, and not consumer sales. For Samsung to report actual unit sales if they actually wanted to, it would require that every retail partner report their sales figures. And as reported in an earlier article, "To be fair, most retail partners that companies like Samsung deal with do not report actual sales numbers."
As a consequence, Samsung cannot accurately breakdown the actual number of units sold. Whereas Apple ships products on confirmed customer orders. But Apple, like most companies, does not usually breakdown individual unit sales; there is a point of how much any company would want to let their competition know.
Exactly what I was saying yesterday. The total number of phones shipped is meaningless because of other factors here. First, their "paired down" phone offerings still include over 30 distinct models (down from 52). A lot of these phones are frankly cheap pieces of trash with low selling prices. Secondly, look at the trend in profit and mobile sales. Sales are down 21% from a year ago, and profits are down an [B]astonishing[/B] 58%. The trend within the trend is worse, because the data means [B]profits are falling twice as fast as sales[/B] are falling.
I said yesterday that if the trend holds, Samsung will exit the completed mobile device business within 5 years. I'm starting to think that's a gross overestimation. I'd give it two years, tops. They are not going to have a mobile division ruin an otherwise healthy company (consumer electronics, semiconductors, etc.).
Samsung makes ZERO on feature phones. So how the HELL does low feature phone sales = 40% less profits?
They just dont want to admit that Apple is destroying Samsung.
@sog35: I think we've been through this before. Do you have any evidence to back up your claim?
According to Strategic Analytics, Samsung in 4Q '14 made about 15.5M non-smartphones (feature phones). I'm not sure why they would stop making feature phones all of sudden in 1Q '15, or perhaps I could just ignore your rant.
Samsung's sales is down only by 0.1% QoQ and this "can be" attributed to the lower sales in feature phones (and tablets). As discussed before, the huge YoY dip comes from China where Samsung was dethroned by Xiaomi and other domestic Chinese makers last year. In the US, where Apple (#1) and Samsung (#2) compete head to head and where the majority of Samsung's high-end devices are sold, Samsung is still going strong, indicating Apple's impact on Samsung's high-end share is largely exaggerated. According to Comscore's recent reports, Samsung's US share went up by 0.7% during Apple's first three months iPhone 6 sales:
Those new devices helped Samsung recapture the title of world's largest smartphone maker from Apple during the March quarter. Samsung shipped 83.2 million smartphones in that period, compared to 61.2 million for Apple.
These two sentences have been blindly published as fact by many Web sites. For the Web sites I visit regularly, only Patently Apple has questioned the numbers. AI has repeated the sentences and sadly will continue to repeat the numbers as fact instead of as, "According to Strategy Analytics...".
Here is something else... When Strategy Analytics published mobile phone data for China, it published numbers for Xiaomi, Apple and Huawei. For some unexplained reason Samsung was ranked at number four without a smartphone number.
Why would Strategy Analytics publish numbers for the leading three companies in China, but choose to not publish any number for Samsung?
Because Strategy Analytics is choosing to publish numbers for other companies while choosing to not publish numbers for Samsung, can Strategy Analytics be trusted to be telling the truth about the 83.2 million worldwide number?
It doesn't matter. Samsung, and Android, got the throne that no one care (apart from deluded Android fans of course, which is 99% of them). Normally everyone will follow the King but on smartphone market nobody did. So it is all meaningless irrespective of how many reported it. They (the media) will only make the fools of themselves.
Beware Samsung. Xiaomi are gonna eat your lunch in India, your last strong hold.
Don't know why we make these comparisons anyways. Samsung shipped 83 million + smartphones how much of those are real sales. Competition is good but so called research experts depending on their bias throw all these numbers out there. And someone can correct me, I'd like to see actual sales numbers or did I miss something.
There is no regulation that any company is required to do so.
The millions of mobile phones reported by Samsung are as shipped into the partner distribution system, and not consumer sales. For Samsung to report actual unit sales if they actually wanted to, it would require that every retail partner report their sales figures. <span style="color:rgb(37,37,37);line-height:1.4em;">And as reported in an </span>
<a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/samsung-comes-clean-galaxy-tab-numbers-not-consumer-sales/" style="line-height:1.4em;" target="_blank">earlier article</a>
<span style="color:rgb(37,37,37);line-height:1.4em;">, "</span>
<span style="color:rgb(37,37,37);line-height:1.4em;">To be fair, most retail partners that companies like Samsung deal with do not report actual sales numbers."</span>
As a consequence, Samsung cannot accurately breakdown the actual number of units sold. Whereas Apple ships products on confirmed customer orders. But Apple, like most companies, does not usually breakdown individual unit sales; there is a point of how much any company would want to let their competition know.
Apple reports 'shipments' (standard industry practice) plus additional information -- usually during the conference calls -- on beginning g and ending channel inventory. If you put that together, you can infer actual sales (which, btw, run quite close to the shipment numbers).
No one else does this: they only report shipments. My guess is that Samsung does not do this because they are embarrassed to reveal their actual sales (as opposed to shipments).
Apple reports 'shipments' (standard industry practice) plus additional information -- usually during the conference calls -- on beginning g and ending channel inventory. If you put that together, you can infer actual sales (which, btw, run quite close to the shipment numbers).
No one else does this: they only report shipments. My guess is that Samsung does not do this because they are embarrassed to reveal their actual sales (as opposed to shipments).
When do companies count a sale as having occurred? Aren't there accounting rules that define it? I seem to recall that in general product isn't shipped before payment arrangements are made. Does payment mean a sale has occurred, no matter whether it came from a carrier, re-seller or end-user?
The reasons I asked these questions is whether you know if Samsung or Oracle or Nokia, or Microsoft etc recognize revenue using the same general guidelines as Apple. I thought there were specific rules that applied.
When do companies count a sale as having occurred? Aren't there accounting rules that define it? I seem to recall that in general product isn't shipped before payment arrangements are made. Does payment mean a sale has occurred, no matter whether it came from a carrier, re-seller or end-user?
The reasons I asked these questions is whether you know if Samsung or Oracle or Nokia, or Microsoft etc recognize revenue using the same general guidelines as Apple. I thought there were specific rules that applied.
For accounting purposes, GAAP is followed. Sales occur when the company transfers the inventory to another seperate entity regardless of payment being received. So that's shipments. Payments outstanding is accrued.
When do companies count a sale as having occurred? Aren't there accounting rules that define it? I seem to recall that in general product isn't shipped before payment arrangements are made. Does payment mean a sale has occurred, no matter whether it came from a carrier, re-seller or end-user?
The reasons I asked these questions is whether you know if Samsung or Oracle or Nokia, or Microsoft etc recognize revenue using the same general guidelines as Apple. I thought there were specific rules that applied.
Yes, they all use the same 'revenue recognition' principles for what counts as a 'sale' for the purposes of the Income Statement.
But that is not theactual amount sold to the consumer.
Apple is the only company in this space for which we can figure out that number.
Apple reports 'shipments' (standard industry practice) plus additional information -- usually during the conference calls -- on beginning g and ending channel inventory. If you put that together, you can infer actual sales (which, btw, run quite close to the shipment numbers).
No one else does this: they only report shipments. My guess is that Samsung does not do this because they are embarrassed to reveal their actual sales (as opposed to shipments).
I can't remember the last time Apple officially reported, shipment numbers; which, by the way, are not standard industry practice nor is it required.
Samsung should be able to be the one company who can compete with Apple in the mobile market. They make the CPU, the display panels and the memory chips. There is no markup as they can get the parts at cost. Xiaomi and the others cannot. I have a suspicion that Xiaomi is selling their products at a loss much like Intel is doing with their mobile chips. Perhaps the Chinese government will be quite generous with loans to Xiaomi. For the life of me, I don't know how Xiaomi really expects to ever profit with their model. However, Samsung can and should be able to. For crying out loud, they've nearly matched Intel's manufacturing process!
Samsung really needs to ditch Android. They need to build a top notch software team that can truly take advantage of their own hardware, not some generic OS that's poorly designed and carries huge amounts of baggage in trying to maintain compatibility with multiple handset manufacturers. They could make Tizen top notch with its own unique set of features rather than simply copying iOS. Android lollipop drains the battery at a high rate and is a deal breaker. If Samsung had control of the OS they could fix it in a timely fashion. However, Google has control. And in fact, I wouldn't put it past Google to have designed the OS to drain the battery in Samsung products so that their own Nexus devices can shine.
Samsung will likely take the role of what Intel was to Microsoft and Windows in making high quality CPUs for devices running Apple's iOS. And that's not a bad place to be. However, they could have been so much more. They sealed their fate when they adopted Android. One thing is for certain, Google is going to lose in a very major fashion when Samsung leaves the mobile market. Intel's chips likely will never be cost competitive at the same performance levels of comparable ARM CPUs. Hence, Xiaomi and the rest will be forced to pay higher costs for components than Apple does for inferior products. That doesn't even begin to account for display costs and memory where Samsung has considerable expertise. And Google thinks this is a model for long term success? Google absolutely needs Samsung. Android as a platform is dead without the Korean chaebol. No other hardware manufacturer will be able to compete with Apple. Not Intel, not LG, not Nokia, not Xiaomi, not Sony, not Microsoft and not even Google itself.
I think Apple makes the highest quality products in the business. But Samsung also does rather well. Google on the other hand certainly does not take their motto very seriously. "Don't be evil." Makes me laugh.
Samsung mobile does not have much of a future at this point. I expect them to exit the market within the next 18 months and cede the market entirely to Apple. Xiaomi and Google are also destined to leave the market also. Without Samsung's presence, neither company can compete with Apple. Maybe Intel will continue to throw billions of dollars to prop up Xiaomi and Google at the same time? I don't think so.
• one, Samsung's profits are very sensitive to sales, i.e., sales in mobile dropped only 20% yoy and yet operating profit dropped over 57%!!!
• and two, probably related, their qoq data implies that they may have just cut marketing spend in order to lower that profit sensitivity. This makes some sense, as they may have slowed some of their advertising spend as they waited for the S6 launches, and I'm quite sure they laid off a number of execs, particularly heavily in their mobile dept, last quarter. Of course, typically, you see an increase in expenditure for severance, but I'm not going to assume Korea functions in the same way. Not to mention, their own report indicates that they cut marketing spend.
And it'll be interesting to see how important that marketing spend is to Samsung. As most know, they spend incredible amounts, multiple times more than companies like Apple, to promote their mobile products. Once the newness of the S6 products wanes, will the decline in marketing spend have any lingering effects? It'll be interesting to watch.
Comments
I think people aren't annoyed at Samsung selling more phones than Apple. But you have to compare (no pun intended) apples with apples. Obviously Samsung will beat Apple globally they simply make more variety of phones and at different price and value points. Now smartphone to smartphone how are they doing? And are shipped phones the same as sold devices. Unless I am mistaken I am of the impression that Apple reports sales volume. I have no problem being corrected if I am wrong. Also many of these reports by these analysts are bias pro or against whose advertising pays their salaries. To quote Joe Friday 'just the facts ma'am.' Even if the good ship Apple isn't on top.
Don't know why we make these comparisons anyways. Samsung shipped 83 million + smartphones how much of those are real sales. Competition is good but so called research experts depending on their bias throw all these numbers out there. And someone can correct me, I'd like to see actual sales numbers or did I miss something.
There is no regulation that any company is required to do so.
The millions of mobile phones reported by Samsung are as shipped into the partner distribution system, and not consumer sales. For Samsung to report actual unit sales if they actually wanted to, it would require that every retail partner report their sales figures. And as reported in an earlier article, "To be fair, most retail partners that companies like Samsung deal with do not report actual sales numbers."
As a consequence, Samsung cannot accurately breakdown the actual number of units sold. Whereas Apple ships products on confirmed customer orders. But Apple, like most companies, does not usually breakdown individual unit sales; there is a point of how much any company would want to let their competition know.
I said yesterday that if the trend holds, Samsung will exit the completed mobile device business within 5 years. I'm starting to think that's a gross overestimation. I'd give it two years, tops. They are not going to have a mobile division ruin an otherwise healthy company (consumer electronics, semiconductors, etc.).
It sounded like he did in post #2.
Samsung makes ZERO on feature phones. So how the HELL does low feature phone sales = 40% less profits?
They just dont want to admit that Apple is destroying Samsung.
@sog35: I think we've been through this before. Do you have any evidence to back up your claim?
According to Strategic Analytics, Samsung in 4Q '14 made about 15.5M non-smartphones (feature phones). I'm not sure why they would stop making feature phones all of sudden in 1Q '15, or perhaps I could just ignore your rant.
Samsung's sales is down only by 0.1% QoQ and this "can be" attributed to the lower sales in feature phones (and tablets). As discussed before, the huge YoY dip comes from China where Samsung was dethroned by Xiaomi and other domestic Chinese makers last year. In the US, where Apple (#1) and Samsung (#2) compete head to head and where the majority of Samsung's high-end devices are sold, Samsung is still going strong, indicating Apple's impact on Samsung's high-end share is largely exaggerated. According to Comscore's recent reports, Samsung's US share went up by 0.7% during Apple's first three months iPhone 6 sales:
3 Month Avg. Ending Dec. 2014 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Sep. 2014
Total U.S. Smartphone Subscribers Age 13+
Source: comScore MobiLens
And there is no evidence so far that supports your claim "Apple is destroying Samsung" for 1Q '15.
Those new devices helped Samsung recapture the title of world's largest smartphone maker from Apple during the March quarter. Samsung shipped 83.2 million smartphones in that period, compared to 61.2 million for Apple.
These two sentences have been blindly published as fact by many Web sites. For the Web sites I visit regularly, only Patently Apple has questioned the numbers. AI has repeated the sentences and sadly will continue to repeat the numbers as fact instead of as, "According to Strategy Analytics...".
Here is something else... When Strategy Analytics published mobile phone data for China, it published numbers for Xiaomi, Apple and Huawei. For some unexplained reason Samsung was ranked at number four without a smartphone number.
Why would Strategy Analytics publish numbers for the leading three companies in China, but choose to not publish any number for Samsung?
Because Strategy Analytics is choosing to publish numbers for other companies while choosing to not publish numbers for Samsung, can Strategy Analytics be trusted to be telling the truth about the 83.2 million worldwide number?
It doesn't matter. Samsung, and Android, got the throne that no one care (apart from deluded Android fans of course, which is 99% of them). Normally everyone will follow the King but on smartphone market nobody did. So it is all meaningless irrespective of how many reported it. They (the media) will only make the fools of themselves.
Beware Samsung. Xiaomi are gonna eat your lunch in India, your last strong hold.
And just to add to that carefully worded sentence, others -- including Samsung -- do not do that.
Apple reports 'shipments' (standard industry practice) plus additional information -- usually during the conference calls -- on beginning g and ending channel inventory. If you put that together, you can infer actual sales (which, btw, run quite close to the shipment numbers).
No one else does this: they only report shipments. My guess is that Samsung does not do this because they are embarrassed to reveal their actual sales (as opposed to shipments).
So where do watches fit in these reports?
The reasons I asked these questions is whether you know if Samsung or Oracle or Nokia, or Microsoft etc recognize revenue using the same general guidelines as Apple. I thought there were specific rules that applied.
For accounting purposes, GAAP is followed. Sales occur when the company transfers the inventory to another seperate entity regardless of payment being received. So that's shipments. Payments outstanding is accrued.
When do companies count a sale as having occurred? Aren't there accounting rules that define it? I seem to recall that in general product isn't shipped before payment arrangements are made. Does payment mean a sale has occurred, no matter whether it came from a carrier, re-seller or end-user?
The reasons I asked these questions is whether you know if Samsung or Oracle or Nokia, or Microsoft etc recognize revenue using the same general guidelines as Apple. I thought there were specific rules that applied.
Yes, they all use the same 'revenue recognition' principles for what counts as a 'sale' for the purposes of the Income Statement.
But that is not the actual amount sold to the consumer.
Apple is the only company in this space for which we can figure out that number.
Apple reports 'shipments' (standard industry practice) plus additional information -- usually during the conference calls -- on beginning g and ending channel inventory. If you put that together, you can infer actual sales (which, btw, run quite close to the shipment numbers).
No one else does this: they only report shipments. My guess is that Samsung does not do this because they are embarrassed to reveal their actual sales (as opposed to shipments).
I can't remember the last time Apple officially reported, shipment numbers; which, by the way, are not standard industry practice nor is it required.
Samsung really needs to ditch Android. They need to build a top notch software team that can truly take advantage of their own hardware, not some generic OS that's poorly designed and carries huge amounts of baggage in trying to maintain compatibility with multiple handset manufacturers. They could make Tizen top notch with its own unique set of features rather than simply copying iOS. Android lollipop drains the battery at a high rate and is a deal breaker. If Samsung had control of the OS they could fix it in a timely fashion. However, Google has control. And in fact, I wouldn't put it past Google to have designed the OS to drain the battery in Samsung products so that their own Nexus devices can shine.
Samsung will likely take the role of what Intel was to Microsoft and Windows in making high quality CPUs for devices running Apple's iOS. And that's not a bad place to be. However, they could have been so much more. They sealed their fate when they adopted Android. One thing is for certain, Google is going to lose in a very major fashion when Samsung leaves the mobile market. Intel's chips likely will never be cost competitive at the same performance levels of comparable ARM CPUs. Hence, Xiaomi and the rest will be forced to pay higher costs for components than Apple does for inferior products. That doesn't even begin to account for display costs and memory where Samsung has considerable expertise. And Google thinks this is a model for long term success? Google absolutely needs Samsung. Android as a platform is dead without the Korean chaebol. No other hardware manufacturer will be able to compete with Apple. Not Intel, not LG, not Nokia, not Xiaomi, not Sony, not Microsoft and not even Google itself.
I think Apple makes the highest quality products in the business. But Samsung also does rather well. Google on the other hand certainly does not take their motto very seriously. "Don't be evil." Makes me laugh.
Samsung mobile does not have much of a future at this point. I expect them to exit the market within the next 18 months and cede the market entirely to Apple. Xiaomi and Google are also destined to leave the market also. Without Samsung's presence, neither company can compete with Apple. Maybe Intel will continue to throw billions of dollars to prop up Xiaomi and Google at the same time? I don't think so.
I took two things away from this:
• one, Samsung's profits are very sensitive to sales, i.e., sales in mobile dropped only 20% yoy and yet operating profit dropped over 57%!!!
• and two, probably related, their qoq data implies that they may have just cut marketing spend in order to lower that profit sensitivity. This makes some sense, as they may have slowed some of their advertising spend as they waited for the S6 launches, and I'm quite sure they laid off a number of execs, particularly heavily in their mobile dept, last quarter. Of course, typically, you see an increase in expenditure for severance, but I'm not going to assume Korea functions in the same way. Not to mention, their own report indicates that they cut marketing spend.
And it'll be interesting to see how important that marketing spend is to Samsung. As most know, they spend incredible amounts, multiple times more than companies like Apple, to promote their mobile products. Once the newness of the S6 products wanes, will the decline in marketing spend have any lingering effects? It'll be interesting to watch.
Isn't that true for every single company that sells a product?