Apple’s holiday quarter sales of 74 million iPhones at an average selling price of $687 means the company captured 93% of the smartphone profits in the quarter, says wealth management company Cannacord.
Perhaps more staggering is that it claims Apple dominated on similar levels across the entire of 2014 — with 79% of mobile device profits.
The company expects continued iPhone growth for the next few years, predicting an estimated 650 million iPhone users by the end of 2018.
Canaccord Genuity’s Mike Walkley said:
“We believe the strong iPhone 6 replacement sales should continue during C’15, as we estimate only 15% of the current estimated 404M iPhone installed base has upgraded to the new devices. We also anticipate continued strong share gains for the larger screen iPhones from high-tier Android smartphones during C’15 driving strong growth in the iPhone installed base and model the iPhone installed base growing to 487M subscribers exiting C’15 up 20% Y/Y.”
Apple is way out in front in terms of profitability, with Samsung a distant second. The report shows Samsung phone shipments accounting for 9% of total profits for the quarter ending in December, which means Apple and Samsung accounted for 102% of the total profit for the quarter.
The 102% amount is possible due to the other phone makers either breaking even, or showing a loss, as Cannacord says HTC, LG, Sony, Lenovo and BlackBerry broke even and Microsoft phone sales (Nokia) showed a relative loss of 2%.
