Mobile Handset Makers & Profits

... or lack thereof, if your company's name is not "Apple" or "Samsung". 

Apple and Samsung continue to soak up all the industry's profits, McCourt says. Apple claimed 87.4% of phone earnings before interest and taxes in the fourth quarter, he said. Samsung took in 32.2% of industry profits. Because their combined earnings were higher than the industry's total earnings as a result of many vendors losing money in Q4, Apple and Samsung mathematically accounted for more than 100% of the industry's earnings.

A year ago, Apple accounted for 77.8% of mobile phone industry profits, followed by Samsung with 26.1%, McCourt said.

Mobile phone market hits 'the great moderation' - Investors.com

Given that they tally to roughly 120% of the mobile handset profits, and they make rather a lot of profit, a 20% loss across HTC, Nokia, Motorola, Sony, etc. is huge. Not only is no one else making money, but no one else is even close to being a viable competitor.

I suspect the biggest reason Samsung is so competitive among the Android handset makers is that it's able to control its own supply thanks to its semiconductor, memory & screen fabrication business.

Shipped vs. Sold

Earlier this week, Samsung announced that they'd shipped 800,000 of their new Galaxy Gear smartwatch. This seemed to many people to be strange, given that the thing was universally panned by the tech press, and even in the event that someone would have liked to buy one, it only worked with the Galaxy Note 3. Kind of a downer, if you'd just bought the Galaxy S3 or S4.

As it turns out, the reality of their sales figures are slightly less... outstanding. 

"Also on September 25, Samsung Electronics released the Galaxy Gear in time for the wearable computing generation. Yet this product has cumulative sales under 50,000, with daily sales of only 800-900 units. These low sales values for the Galaxy Gear are far below the initial expectations of the industry."

Not exactly numbers that are setting the world on fire.