Samsung's Mixed News: Retakes Largest Smartphone Vendor Crown, but Profits Still Down

[dgstorm]

Samsung's quarterly results are in, and they are both fantastic and terrible at the same time. On the one hand, Sammy has now retaken the top spot for total smartphones sold. On the other hand, their profits declined again.

Here's how those results breakdown:

The Good:

• Samsung held 24.1% of global smartphone shipments in Q1 2015, while Apple dropped to 17.7%.
• Out of 345 million total units shipped, 83.2 million were from Samsung. Apple shipped 61.2 million, Lenovo-Motorola shipped 18.8 million, and Huawei shipped 17.3 million, while the rest where in the "others" category.
• The best part of this news is that it occurred before the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge even shipped, so those numbers should be even better later this year.

The Bad:

• Samsung's first quarter profits fell 39%. This is a drop from $7.8 billion in the same quarter a year ago to $4.35 billion.
• Specifically, the year over year profits from Samsung’s mobile unit dropped by over 50%. This was a precipitous fall from 6.43 trillion won to 2.74 trillion won, (a $3.4 billion decrease).
• Samsung's primary competitor, Apple, had the opposite happen with a 40% increase in year over year profit for the same quarter.
• Apple's iPhones accounted for 89% of all smartphone profits for Q1 2015.

Basically, while Samsung sold more phones than Apple, conversely Apple made all the money on the phones they sold. Despite this lop-sided disparity, the future actually looks bright for Samsung later this year. The sales of the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge have already broken numerous Samsung records, and it should be one of the more profitable phones for Samsung in the long run.

Source: Samsung

 

[Jonny Kansas]

Interesting figures...

 

[mountainbikermark]

I wonder how non removable memory affects the figures. As the cost of internal memory drops the price to get more (about $100 each double). Samsung skipping the non removable memory until the S6 has to have affected the numbers at least some, perhaps that's why they went that route with the S6. Say it costs $9 , or similar, for an extra 32GB is storage. Apple sells it for $100 more,a $91 net profit. 61.2 million x $9 is well over half a billion in net on top of the rest. Had Samsung done it the extra net would be just under 3/4 billion @ the numbers I used for cost vs sell price.

 

[FoxKat]

I wonder how non removable memory affects the figures. As the cost of internal memory drops the price to get more (about $100 each double). Samsung skipping the non removable memory until the S6 has to have affected the numbers at least some, perhaps that's why they went that route with the S6. Say it costs $9 , or similar, for an extra 32GB is storage. Apple sells it for $100 more,a $91 net profit. 61.2 million x $9 is well over half a billion in net on top of the rest. Had Samsung done it the extra net would be just under 3/4 billion @ the numbers I used for cost vs sell price.

Conversely, I wonder how the non removable battery has impacted their profit margins. There's possibly two different directions we could go with this. One is that the non removable batteries are less expensive because they don't need to be in a packaging that can be handled in more rough fashion as in a hard casing vs never really being roughed up or abused it all in soft packaging. On the other hand, you may have seen the opposite effect take place where although the profit per battery is higher, less people may have bought the phones because they wanted removable batteries and were disappointed in the non removable battery design.

 

[Ollie]

These are phones shipped. Had the numbers reflected sold units instead of shipped units then their profits would be much higher.

 

[mountainbikermark]

Conversely, I wonder how the non removable battery has impacted their profit margins. There's possibly two different directions we could go with this. One is that the non removable batteries are less expensive because they don't need to be in a packaging that can be handled in more rough fashion as in a hard casing vs never really being roughed up or abused it all in soft packaging. On the other hand, you may have seen the opposite effect take place where although the profit per battery is higher, less people may have bought the phones because they wanted removable batteries and were disappointed in the non removable battery design.

FK and Ollie, I was basing from actual not hypothetical. Most non forum geeks could care less, many probably don't even know they can take the back off of their phone much less remove the battery or install a memory card. These are folks that an aftermarket launcher is over their head to install and set up and uploading a photo to Facebook is about as deep as they'll dig into the aspects of their device
I didn't know non removable batteries were cheaper also. Again, possibly why they switched it up.