Though Apple sells a lot of iPhones, it accounts for fewer than one in five smartphone sales worldwide. But when it comes to making money, Apple doesn't just have the biggest slice of the pie: it pretty much has the whole pie.

Apple reaped 92 percent of the total profits earned by the world’s top eight smartphone makers in the first quarter of 2015, according to research outfit Canaccord Genuity, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. To put things into perspective, there are about 1,000 companies that make smartphones, the Journal says. And Apple has topped them all, and by way more than ever: during the same period one year ago, Apple's share of the profits was 65 percent.

So how does Apple make all the money without selling most of the phones? The not-so-big secret is that Apple owns the premium end of the smartphone market. Apple sells its phones for higher prices, yielding wider profit margins, and consumers are willing to pay.

Other brands don't enjoy the same good fortune.

Samsung has long sought to offer the high-end Android answer to the iPhone alongside its more budget-friendly models. Instead, the world's leading smartphone maker by units shipped finds itself squeezed at the top by Apple and at the bottom by inexpensive Android rivals such as Xiaomi. Samsung shipped 82.4 million handsets in the first quarter of 2015, compared to 61.2 million units sold by Apple, according to market research outfit IDC. Yet last week, Samsung revealed it expected a 4 percent decline in operating profit compared to the same period a year ago, the seventh straight quarter of year-over-year declines.

In all, Canaccord says Samsung accounted for 15 percent of total smartphone profits in Q1 2015. (Apple and Samsung’s numbers can add up to more than 100 percent because Canaccord’s calculations also included companies that broke even or lost money.)

Along with competitors' woes, Apple owes its increasing dominance in large part to its growing success in China. In April, the company revealed that it had sold more phones in China than in the US for the first time. It also reported a 71 percent year-over-year increase in revenue from iPhone sales in the country, surpassing homegrown Xiaomi in the process.

In the past, the smartphone market showed that fortunes could be volatile for the players involved. When Apple launched its first iPhone in 2007, Nokia claimed two-thirds of the industry profits. By 2012, Apple and Samsung had more or less an equal share of the profits. Now Apple stands far and away above the competition, and it's likely to remain there so long as Android handset makers find themselves caught in a death-spiral race to the low end of the market. Android may be on most of the world's phones. But no one has figured out a winning formula yet for turning that popularity into Apple-like profits.