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Apple Has The Majority Of Smartphone Profits And Samsung More Than All The Rest

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An interesting little look into the state of play in he cellphone handset market. Despite Android having by far the majority of the market, Apple actually has the majority of the profits. And Samsung has more than all the rest of the profits in the sector too.

 The latest data from Canaccord Genuity, shared with AppleInsider by analyst T. Michael Walkley on Thursday, estimates that Apple took 56 percent of the operating profits for feature phones and smartphones in the third quarter of calendar 2013. Coming in close second was Samsung, which took 53 percent of industry profits.

Of course, the mathematically astute will note that we've not got 109% of industry profits there in just two firms. The answer being that in the rest of the market Sony broke even and everyone else was making losses. Blackberry with a negative 4% of industry profits and Google's Motorola with a negative 3%.

It should be noted that this doesn't cover the Chinese market with the large number of smaller players there. So it's also not covering Lenovo's or HTC's efforts in that market either.

The thing that most surprised me about these numbers (for we've been seeing similar things for the past few quarters) was that this is for the entire feature and smartphone market: and Apple isn't even in the feature phone market at all.

Of course, for consumers this is just absolutely great. Vast amounts of capital is being deployed to try and gain their custom and at that lower end of the market no one is making any profit back. Thus the consumers are getting the electronics at the lowest possible price.

It's also an interesting illustration of the way in which the patent wars aren't working against consumer interests. Sure, the patents are there to protect innovators. But if innovation was being so protected then we wouldn't have a cut throat industry where only the two leading companies are making profits. That there aren't profits for the also rans is evidence that it is a competitive industry. And a competitive industry (in that sense of free market competition) cannot be one where legal restrictions are curtailing new entrants and their ability to challenge the incumbents.