Apple Stock News

Apple is basically the only company making money from smartphones at this point. Every quarter, Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Walkley takes a look at the state of profits of smartphone companies. Apple’s record-breaking holiday quarter, which brought in $18 billion in earnings, allowed the company to capture 93 percent of the profit in the handset industry. Besides Samsung, nobody else in the market is making any money, with BlackBerry, Lenovo, Sony, and HTC all lucky to break even.

The profit share in the market made by Apple is obviously impressive, but is made even more so by the fact that they had 20% of the global smartphone market last quarter. Samsung actually sold the same amount of phones, but the average selling price of the two companies was far apart. Apple sold 74.5 million iPhones at an average selling price of $698. Samsung, meanwhile, sold the same number of smartphones, plus another 20 million dumb phones, at an average price of $206.

Samsung is losing ground in its fight with Apple for smartphone dominance. It still sells more phones than any other company, but its profits are eroding because Apple is eating into its sales of high-end smartphones. This trend is likely to continue after the enormous success of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, which have larger screens. Both of these phones gave Apple a huge boost in China, an important market for Samsung..