Know something we should know? Send us a note at our tips line. We respect anonymity. »
The Spoils Go To The Smartest. Apple And RIM Take Majority Of Cell Phone Industry Profits
by Erick Schonfeld on June 1, 2009

When you look at sales of the iPhone or Blackberry as a percentage of total cell phone sales, they are still a tiny smidgen of the one billion phones estimated to be sold this year. But when you look at what really matters—their share of revenues or operating profits—the picture looks a lot different. Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff calculated the share of operating profits going to each major mobile handset manufacturer and came up with the eye-opening chart above. It shows Apple (pink) and RIM (turquoise) increasingly taking a disproportionate share of industry profits, mostly at the expense of Nokia’s diminishing handset operating profits (blue).

Read the rest of this entry »