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iPhone -- 20% Profit Share of Mobile Industry?

By , Monday, Jul 20, 2009 at 9:40 am
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The Wall Street Journal (via MacRumors) published a report stating that while Apple's iPhone, and RIM's BlackBerry make up only 3% of mobile phone sales last year, the gobbled up a huge 35% take of the profits. iPhone specifically was pegged at 1% of sales and 20% of profit. Boom! indeed.

Says Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff:

The disparity will become even starker this year when the two will take 5% of the market in unit terms but 58% of total operating profits.

While feature phone maker Nokia can compete due to vast economies of scale, their profits have been declining, as have Sony Ericsson. Palm's Pre is seen as something of a wildcard, depending on developer support and distribution reach.

For their part, Apple is set to announce Q3 results tomorrow, July 21, at 5pm ET. TiPb will provide our usual coverage of the conference call, especially as results pertain to the iPhone.

Rene Ritchie

Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.

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  1. Joe McG says:

    Well, they have to keep profits high in order to make back all that money they spent on developing Copy and Paste and MMS. . .

    __Calm down guys, It's just a joke...

  2. afrocane says:

    LMAO!

  3. frog says:

    That's fairly impressive.

  4. Don says:

    Actually they need the profits to hire the top comedy writers to come up with new "app rejection" reasons!

  5. Noodle says:

    I'm surprised nobody has been crying like a baby about Palm not showing up in this is this study.

  6. Levertis says:

    @don

    lol lol lol omg lol lol lol. That's the truth lol

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