Apple Makes 75% of Mobile Phone Profits, With Only 9% of the Phones

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Apple's share of the global market in mobile phones -- not just smart phones, but all mobile phones -- has expanded from 3 percent in 2010 to just under 9 percent today. That doesn't quite sound like the dominance you'd expect from the world's most profitable technology company. But then you look at the profit pie, and boom: Apple devours three out of every four dollars of mobile phone profit in the world. From a new quarterly report by Asymco's Horace Dediu (via Fortune):

http://fortunebrainstormtech.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/screen-shot-2012-02-03-at-7-44-25-am.png

Here's another way to tell that story, from the perspective of Apple, rather than the mobile phone market:

In January 2006, the iPhone didn't exist. Five years later, iPhones accounted for more than half of the company's $46 billion in revenue and $13 billion in profit over the last 14 weeks of 2011. Here's that graph from Business Insider:

chart of the day, apple quarterly revenue by product, jan 24 2012



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Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for TheAtlantic.com. More

Thompson has written for Slate, BusinessWeek, and the Daily Beast. He has also appeared as a guest on radio and television networks, including NPR, the BBC, CNBC, and MSNBC.

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