Market share doesn’t mean much

Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson – that’s the market share classification that most people use to rank handset makers. However, people overlook profitability, The key metric in a mature business like cellphones. While Nokia still commands 60% of the industry’s profit and 45% of the market share, both Blackberry and Apple get about 20% of the profits with a relatively tiny number of handsets shipped. That means that they are much more efficient companies. 

In the early days of cellphones, it was all about marketshare or “land grabbing”. It is weird that more than a decade after handsets became mainstream, some companies still think that way and still seem to have the goal of maintaining market share at any price. It’s not so hard to generate high revenues with even higher losses, but in the end, those who can’t pull a profit for a long period of time will just go away.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Apple Inc, BlackBerry, market share, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson