Horace Dediu from asymco put up a couple of very interesting graphs on the operating profit of the top eight mobile phone manufacturers yesterday. The second one in particular is fairly eye opening:
Generally speaking, vendors which are focused on smartphones have higher pricing and higher profitability (pricing discussion will follow at a later time). However, some, like Motorola and Sony Ericsson are still trying to recover from the collapse of their non-smartphone business and have higher prices but not very high margins overall. LG does not seem far behind.
Apple’s making an insane amount of profit per phone sold, undoubtedly due to only being in the smartphone business along with having a mature, efficient manufacturing process honed over the last few years.
It begs the question, “Would you rather make a lot of profit on a smaller volume of sales or a little profit on a large volume of sales?”
Read more: Making it up in volume: How profit and volumes traded-off in the fourth quarter | asymco.
