There’s no doubt of Apple’s dominance in the consumer electronics space, but sometimes it takes a look at the numbers to show just how dominant the company is. Canaccord Genuity, a brokerage and financial service company headquartered in Canada, released numbers showing that with just a 20 percent share of the global smartphone market, Apple pulled in 92 percent of the total operating income of the top eight smartphone manufacturers in the first quarter of 2015. Just last year, the number was at a still-respectable 65 percent.
Apple and Samsung — which had 15 percent of smartphone industry profits in the quarter — account for more than 100 percent of industry profits. That’s because of the thousand or so smartphone manufacturers on the planet, most either broke even or lost money.
Can Apple keep this up? Former Verizon COO Denny Strigl, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, said “The dominance of Apple is something that is very hard to overcome. Apple has to stumble somehow or another, and I don’t think that’s going to happen.” The iPhone sells for an average global price of $624, compared to an average for Android smartphones of about $185. Rumors have it that Apple has put in a record order for the next generation of iPhone 6 (the so-called “iPhone 6s”), while Samsung stumbled with the launch of the Galaxy S6 by ordering the manufacture of more than the market could handle.
