Samsung publically enjoyed riding its current wave of success as it highlighted monster profits of £2.9bn in the fourth quarter of 2011 during its annual earnings call. That's a Scrooge McDuck-scale pool of cash to be sure, but it's a puddle compared to the ocean of moolah Apple is wallowing in.
The Korean electronics giant achieved £26.7bn in total sales across its whole business over the last three months, of which £2.9bn was clear profit. We're not sure how much of that cash will be spent on a party, but we'd hope it's most of it.
It's been a rosy year for Samsung, with it proudly announcing 300 million phone sales in 2011. Unsurprisingly, most of those sales were attributed to the Galaxy S2, but sales of the Note, the Nexus and the currently non-existent Galaxy S3 are sure to boost these numbers handsomely in 2012.
Samsung's phones made up around 45 per cent of its total earnings, with its semiconductor sector also making some healthy wonga and its display sector -- particularly its glorious TVs -- reportedly generating £3.5bn in sales.
Impressive stuff, sure, but the shine is rubbed off a little when you bear in mind Apple's monster figures, including a record profit of £8.3bn. Much of that profit came from the sale of the iPhone 4S, of which 37 million were sold in the last 14 weeks of 2011 alone.
Considering Apple has one phone against Samsung's galaxy of, er, Galaxies, we can't help but tip our hat to Apple on this one. In fact, the iPhone outsold all Android phones put together in America, although it lags here in Europe.
Still, Samsung is infinitely healthier than Nokia, which posted a total loss of £800m at the end of 2011. It reckons the Windows Phone Lumia 800 didn't launch in time to prevent this loss, so will certainly be hoping for more positive figures in 2012, with the Lumia 800, the cheaper Lumia 710 and the upcoming high-end Lumia 900.
There's everything to play for this year and with Mobile World Congress just around the corner, we're really excited to see what the figures look like later in the year. In the meantime, drop us your market analysis in the comments below, or over on our impecunious Facebook page.
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tbag 27 January, 2012 13:33
Given the products sold by Apple and the quite unbelievable profits made in comparison to Samsung (who have a much larger market and a huge product portfolio) i can only assume Apple products prices are even more grossly inflated than i had originally assumed or Samsung is run by somebody very incompetent?? Logically it just doesn’t make sense to me....
anonymous 28 January, 2012 05:30
@tbag
if the products are that grossly inflated with pricing, why the hell did 200,000,000 buy such an overpriced phone? Seriously, it is not overpriced if it a success. It means that it has a high value. Before you cry, at least take note that I was doing an analysis for business studies on apple, and i was rejected on saying that their products were overpriced. I was told that since they are such big hits, they are of a high value. Makes sense doesn't it?
ponyman 28 January, 2012 11:24
My corner shop probably made about £20,000 profit last year. Does that mean they are a complete failure? How can anyone measure the quality of a product or even the success of a company purely by the ultimate profit made by selling it? Apart from showing that Apple are greedier than Samsung I don't see what point the author of this article was making. If Apple hadn't been constantly taking Samsung to court and getting it's products banned by easily manipulated judges, then I am sure that Apple's profit margin would be relatively lower. Additionally Apple uses very cheap but dangerous manufacturing processes, which would be illegal in the West, through exploiting desperate far eastern workers. Add in the huge but ignorant fan base who buy anything with the Apple logo on it, regardless of its merits and it is not surprising that Apple make a lot of money. What Apple is hugely successful at is in their marketing (which includes manipulating the media to their advantage) - even if this means selling inferior products at premium prices.
anonymous 29 January, 2012 22:59
@anonymous
I think what tbag means is that apples products have a much higher margin on them than the samsung equivalents and I would have to agree on that point. Case in point the Mac Book Pros and iMacs for similar spec machines you can spend 500 or even 1000 pounds less on what is essentially the same product with a different OS. There are minor differences in terms of design and build quality but that doesn't make up for that wide of a price disparity.
tbag 30 January, 2012 09:31
@anonymous 29th
You are indeed right, that’s the point i was trying to make :-) For products that contain many parts from different manufacturers and are not bespoke to Apple its a wonder they can make such a profit from selling them. For example 26% of the IPhone 4 is made up of some parts manufactured by Samsung... At one point the IPhone 4 would have retailed at $560, it cost $185 to make including all parts and labour (@ $7 per phone) leaving a profit per phone of $375. Out of that around $7 of that was profit for Foxconn leaving Apple with a profit of $368 per iPhone, 66% profit, very impressive. Other things haven’t been factored in such as distribution and the like but the point i was trying to make is why are Samsung not making a similar profit on their products? So they might not sell as many phones as Apple right now but given all of the products they sell (biggest supplier of TV’s in the world) one would expect them to be rolling in it if they could make at least 50% profit from each product. There are various elements you can look at, labour costs for example, but I cannot see they would be much different for Samsung. I haven’t really looked into it but its puzzling, what’s holding Samsung’s profits back??