Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
I'm more surprised by their lack of success in other areas than I am by their success in the cell phone market. I think that Apple's lead in smartphone sales for a quarter was basically an anomaly and that this is a more normal result.
Samsung makes over 100 phones, covering almost all income levels. It has phones that compete directly against Apple phones (SGII) and phones that, while still smartphones, are not designed to compete with first tier phones (i.e., the continuum). Samsung is in almost every country and on every carrier.
But as long as Apple is making 2/3 of the profits for the entire industry, I don't think that they will change what they are doing.
There is no reason to discount these numbers because they represent numbers shipped rather than sold. Shipping is *almost always* a good proxy for sales. It turned out not to be in the tablet market because so many non-Apple tablets had such bad sales...but in most mature markets, it is a decent indicator. And there is certainly no evidence that retailers are sitting on large quantities of unsold samsung phones.
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I agree that it is highly unlikely there are a bunch of phones sitting around in inventory, mostly because they aren't a retail item like tablets, but more a carrier experience. Plus given how poorly their other divisions did, it's obvious their profits had to come from a great mobile quarter.
I do note though that those numbers aren't from Samsung, either shipped or sold. They are an estimate from Strategy Analytics. Samsung is no longer reporting sales numbers for mobile products.