carrier

This was initially posted on LinkedIn December 16, 2013.

Innovation comes in many forms. Many times innovation is thought of as technological improvement or as invention. We can all cite examples of inventions which turned into industries which re-defined civilization. The steam engine comes to mind but there were many others before and after. Inventing something is certainly a way to create value but it's not as common or as reliable a method as it might seem. Creating Intellectual Property is one thing, finding a defensible market and business model is quite another.

More often companies innovate in terms of processes or the "algorithms" which are used to deploy existing resources. Wal*Mart was immensely innovative in the way it organized itself and laid out a low-cost business model. More recently Amazon has innovated in distribution and fulfillment based on the ability to dispense with showrooms for products and sell directly online. There is little in terms of technology which Amazon "invented". Rather, it deployed off-the-shelf technology in a novel way.

But what I want to address is a more mundane sort of innovation: marketing innovation, specifically pricing. Few would consider a price model to be an innovation but in fact it's a core lynchpin to many breakthrough innovations. It was pricing which permitted Henry Ford to build an industrial empire. He could have built cars for those who could afford them as cars were defined in 1907 but he chose to build a car around a price point which was around the median of the population. A car "so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one." His business logic began with a price and the product and process followed.

Another aspect of pricing innovation is "bundling" where products which might sell poorly independent of each other sell very well when coupled with complements. Consider the original Microsoft Office. When introduced vis-a-vis Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect as separate products, it handily won the market for spreadsheets and word processors. Bundling is also the way TV is sold. Cable companies don't offer channels a-la-carte. It even took root in the car business. Automakers are now selling upgrades as "equipment packages", a method proving far more popular (and profitable) than the menu system of old.

But there are cases where bundling has been rejected by users. iTunes broke the bundle of the "Album" where the only way you could get a single was to buy a dozen other songs. Once broken, the album bundle shows no signs of a come-back. Many are questioning whether TV channel bundling is also ripe for such a break-up.

And there is yet another looming bundle question. For as long as the market existed, mobile carriers sold their service bundled with a device. This harks back to the days when AT&T (known then as the Bell Network) did not permit users to own their own landline phone. They argued that the device is a part of the network and choice in the matter would compromise security and safety of a crucial infrastructure. The argument played well with regulators for decades.

This tie between the device and the service persists today but the connection has been preserved not though regulatory fiat but through incentives in pricing. Arguably, the low price of devices, and hence cost of entry, has meant that penetration skyrocketed. Cellular service now reached saturation in the US in near-record time. The upgrading to smartphones is now about 60% complete and looks to saturate a mere 8 years after reaching 10% of the population.

So in a way, the "innovation" of the carriers has been in bundling and creating a package that was irresistible to consumers. They went from not consuming mobile networks to consuming them universally. The amount being spent by consumers on mobile services is above $1.3 trillion world-wide--a market that did not even exist 20 years ago.

So now the question being asked, even within the industry, is whether this bundling can long last. The way I would answer the question is by following the logic from the consumer's point of view. If the bundle is valuable, then it's likely it will be tolerated, even preferred. In the case of software and car options the model works. Even in the case of TV the model is still preferred as few consumers are defecting to the IP-based unbundled alternatives. In the case of music, the consumers prefer the unbundling because there were things in the bundle which they did not need or want. They wanted a song, not a song and others which they might like.

But in the case of network service and device, the split is more subtle. A service is useless without a device and a device is useless without a service. The bundle makes sense from the point of view of co-dependency of modules. The broader question is one of choice. The premise of unbundling might be that users can choose service and devices separately and change them arbitrarily.

There is a fundamental problem with this however. A service that can be switched on or off easily by consumers is economically challenging for network operators. The economics of networks are such that financing them requires steady cash flow and every operator desires stability. So incentives will be put in place for consumers to stick around, and these incentives (read innovations) work. But isn't the device itself such an incentive?

We end up back where we started. The business model and economics of operators world-wide is such that the device is a critical part of the incentive structure which preserves the network's economic balance.

It may be an illusion, but a cheap phone (with a long-term contract) is a fundamental innovation devised by telco operators even before the phone became mobile. Operators have come to love it and no matter how many technology generations go by; how many family plans, bucket plans, weekend minutes, rollovers, and data packages; no matter how many tweaks and re-brands the model gets, it will persist. There simply isn't sufficient win-win value in alternatives.

Photo credit: Wikipedia, CVN-78

I've been writing about Apple's capital intensive operations for some time. The difficulty has always been in explaining the scale involved. I've compared the spending to that of Samsung, Microsoft, Google, Intel and Amazon. But these numbers still can't be easily grasped. You can't point to any comparable objects when you try to explain the figure. I struggle to create a less abstract notion than that of a "sea of tooling and servers."

Instead, I've used the analogy of US aircraft carriers. Historically, Nimitz class aircraft carriers have cost a less than $5 billion. The USS Ronald Reagan, christened in 2001, cost $4.5 billion. Therefore I was comfortable saying that Apple spends the equivalent of about one Nimitz class aircraft carrier every six months (and that the Navy takes about six years to put it together.)

Unfortunately, costs for aircraft carriers have gone up. The USS Gerald Ford will take about $13 billion to complete. That places Apple and Samsung capital spending in the following context:

Note however that planning and construction for the latest aircraft carrier takes 12 years, rather than the 12 months spending schedule for the companies shown. Note also that Apple's spending is unspecified and included several categories while Samsung's categories are partially specified.

Due to this inflation in aircraft carrier costs, my denomination of capex is beginning to be strained. Nevertheless, the question of what Apple spends $10 billion a year remains knowing what that could buy the Navy (or Samsung.)

My thanks to Kirk Burgess for providing this transcript:

Horace Dediu interview on CNBC Asia Cash Flow show - 10th September 2013

Chloe Cho (CNBC): Take us through what Apple is exactly trying to do?

Horace Dediu: Well, this is the first time in the six years of this competition in the smartphone market that Apple has broadened its portfolio. We have seen only a single product launch every year--this is very unorthodox in the industry. Normally each competitor [ranges] dozens of devices. Apple's entry has been asymmetric from the start, and now in its sixth year we are expecting to see, finally, a broadening perhaps into two separate products. The question will be whether [there will be] a significantly lower price point for the so-called 5C and whether that will change the average selling price overall for the portfolio. The average selling price has been remarkably steady, and remarkably high, typically around $600 for the duration of this products life. Something, again, unprecedented. My expectation is the new price point will be quite a bit lower than $600, starting with about $450, it might drop a bit further, [which] would cause the overall price range to come down as we have seen with the iPad; [where we] also had a price erosion happen as the smaller version came out.

Q: Horace, do you think they have got the timing right? Should they have done this a little bit earlier when the market wasn't so saturated and filled with cutthroat competition?

A: Indeed, I think. As I said, as a product with six years in the market it's a bit late; I expected this to happen last year. I think a lot of the momentum that has been lost in the past year in terms of sales growth has been because of the lack of low end. To note also will be whether they indeed expand their carrier footprint. We are expecting something new in Japan and possibly China Mobile. There is a second announcement happening with a few hours delay in China. This is again the first time that has ever happened.

Q: Horace, do you think they didn’t move down the value chain fast enough largely because they didn’t have a deal with China Mobile?

A: Well that's always a good question whether they are driven more by carrier channels or are they driven more by consumer market expectations. I think it's a bit of both. We do have this hybrid approach where they continue selling this older product for one or two years after the new product is launched--so the 4 and 4S are still available while the 5 is being ranged. This strategy is hybrid I say because this isn't truly a low end product, it is a stale product that is being put out there. This [strategy] may be driven more by consumer demand, not so much what operators are asking for. With the 5C we might be looking at a solution for operators in particular.

Q: Horace, how much do some these incumbents like Apple and Samsung need to be worried about Microsoft approaching their space?

A: I believe Microsoft will not be competitive in the near term. I don't think [during] the next year we are going to see a very impactful entry from Microsoft. What Microsoft is likely do is lower prices significantly on Nokia's portfolio and their pipeline as it is. That might cause more pressure on the pricing, but the problem has been that consumers have not really been taking up the Windows Phone platform very aggressively. It has been somewhat successful in Europe but not taking off elsewhere. I think Microsoft will be in an integration mode with the Nokia assets into 2014, but I would expect in a year from now we might see some new entry product that would be exciting. I think 2-3 years down the road we might see something from Microsoft that would excite consumers as well.

Q: There has been a lot of focus on which companies have a more integrated house, Apple or Samsung. In light of the fact that they are having to move into lower price points, in your view which is doing the better Job, Apple or Samsung?

A: Well Samsung is a great industrial enterprise and they are doing very well by broadening as much as possible their portfolio, even before the smartphone race started for them, which was in 2010, they were known for being one of the most prolific product creators out there. They actually had over 100 different mobile phones, not smartphones, just regular mobile phones that they would range, and Nokia were extremely concerned by this pressure they were getting from Samsung.

What they have seen since 2010 is the same thing, except with smartphones, and so they’ve been really prolific and covering the spectrum of price and screen and every other possible variant that could be made. I think however that Samsung hasn’t got a software platform under its belt. They could become a software player by taking over some of the control of Android as we have seen Amazon do, and thus really establish themselves as a platform player. They are doing so to some degree with the "Gear" product, and they might be doing something like this by launching their development conference this year.

But they aren't yet a platform player whereas Apple is, but then again we just don’t know what the politics of Android are with respect to forking it by an OEM as large as Samsung.

The iPhone is a severely constrained product. We're used to thinking that it's production constrained—and it is, but it's also distribution constrained. It has a business model that is almost completely dependent on operator subsidy. Few end users pay the $650 average price that Apple obtains and that price point has held for a remarkably long time. This price point is largely invisible to the user.

In this regard it's very different from all the other products Apple sells. Historically, the company has preferred having its customers to also be its users and maintained a direct relationship with them, strengthening that relationship through its own retail channel for the last decade. Pricing is used by Apple as a signal to clearly illustrate value to the user and pricing is part of the communication about the product that Apple makes very explicit. This has been true for the iPod and Mac and is still true of the iPad. But this is not so for the iPhone. The entire marketing strategy for the iPhone (and hence the entire product concept itself) is "off message".

Why is this?

Before we get into causes, let's try to measure the distribution channel for the iPhone. Apple occasionally reports the total number of carriers it has relationships with. The last update was in the summer when Peter Oppenheimer, Apple CFO discussed the quarter ending June:

We added several small regional carriers during the quarter and now have iPhone distribution through over 250 carriers in over 100 countries.…

We added China Telecom as the second [Chinese] carrier in March…

We also don’t expect to add any significant new country or carrier additions in the September quarter…

In addition, Apple publishes the list of operators it sells through on its web site. The last time I counted I got 227 listed operators.

If we contrast this with the total number of global operators (excluding MVNOs) there might be a way to measure distribution penetration. I compiled a list of all such operators based on information available in Wikipedia. You can browse the list here (Google Docs [1]).

This global list includes 802 operators. The list is not current, being mostly based on 2009 data but it's pretty close. I've read that a more recent (non-public) estimate is 816.

By this measure we can say that Apple has distribution through about 30% of the total operators. Consider also that RIM reports that it sells BlackBerry through 565 wireless carriers in over 175 countries. By this metric alone BlackBerry has twice the addressable market of the iPhone.

But we can do better than counting operators. We should account for the fact that some operators have more subscribers than others.

Using the same database, I measured the subscriber count of iPhone distributing carriers vs. overall subscriber count. The ratio was about 50%.

iPhone "addresses" about 2.8 billion connections whereas there are about 5.7 billion available connections. Note that this is not users but subscriptions—essentially SIM cards.

The ratios vary by region:

• Middle-east/Africa has 29%
• Asia/Pacific is at 39%
• Europe 73%
• The Americas 83%

 

We can take it a step further and identify which countries hold the highest opportunity for iPhone distribution. The top 5 are:

1. India: 658 million
2. China: 622 million
3. Pakistan: 116 million
4. Russia: 102 million
5. Nigeria: 89 million

But the opportunity is not only in emerging markets. Japan is a 69 million subs opportunity and even the US has 80 million subs without direct (i.e. subsidized) access to the iPhone.

So we can now return to the question of why the iPhone is sold the way it is.

First I should point out that the addressable market of Samsung or Android in general is larger than that of the iPhone. Samsung has relationships with far more operators, at least on the scale of RIM or Nokia, perhaps even more. It might be safe to assume that Android is completely unconstrained in distribution and therefore its addressable market is the entire subscriber space (meaning that Android has twice the addressable market of the iPhone.) For Apple to compete on the basis of volume or market share it would make sense to broaden this network. So what's holding it back?

I think the answer is the other constraint mentioned: production. The company is still iterating the product on a yearly basis and needs to ramp production to reach all its carrier partners in a timely fashion. The carriers use the iPhone as differentiation and a way to uplift their core business. Therefore they want the latest version as quickly as possible. To satisfy this, Apple needs to manufacture the latest variant very quickly. But that's not easy. Peak production is one thing but getting there quickly is another. This is the problem which Apple's vast capital expenditures is trying to solve.

So far the production capacity has been increasing at nearly 100% per annum. This is an astonishing achievement but it's still not enough. The product is supply constrained during much of the launch quarter. Therefore, to summarize, the entire business model for the iPhone revolves around this question:

Can enough units be shipped in a sufficiently short time frame to allow a limited (but large) subset of operators to create competitive advantage which sustains a generous up-front subsidy.

At this time the answer seems to be that the model can work for about 30% of operators serving 50% of subscribers. The crucial question for the business is how much higher can these numbers get?

Note that this is not a debate about market share or consumer preference but about delivering a particular value proposition to network operators, (which sustains a premium price point.) The iPhone is built around this business model and to alter it would alter the very essence of what the product is. The addressable market is one piece of the product but it interconnects with the price, margin, design, production and breadth of offering. You cannot change one without changing the others. It's a product whose distribution model is part and parcel of its design.

I believe that the particular way this product translates into a business is very rigid, which is why it has not changed much during the life of the product. This is in contrast to Apple's other products which exhibit more market flexibility. Inter-dependency is not a new concept for Apple products (e.g. iPod/iTunes, Mac/MacOS) but the iPhone shows a level of inter-dependency with distribution and production the likes of which has never been seen.

This topic will be further discussed at Asymconf in January as the fourth quarter data will then be available and there will be an opportunity to debate it live with an august audience.

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Notes:

1. The database is neither current nor complete. If you would like to help maintain the data based on local (public) information, please get in touch and I can grant access to edit it.

The second quarter showed continuing growth for Android with 19 points of share growth from a year ago. Only Windows Phone showed a gain y/y in share up 1.6 points to about 3%. In the same time, Bada lost half a point, iOS lost 2.1 points, RIM lost 7.2, Symbian 11.4.

The result is shown in the graph below:

I also show a "before-and-after" pair of pie charts which show the difference in smartphone platform market share from the same quarter three years ago. Android went from 3% share to 67% while Symbian went from 41% to 4% and RIM went from 19% to 5%. iOS increased its share from 13% to 17%.

If this trend continues Android could reach 50% of all phones sold in a few years. That's a run rate of 200 million per quarter. And it's likely that 100 million of those will be shipped by Chinese vendors.

However, looking at the global picture can also miss some important trends in local markets. Had one looked at the global smartphone business in 2005, the conclusion would have been that Symbian would be the dominant platform in perpetuity.

What affected the global market was a change in the US: the launch of iOS and thereafter of Android. The US, a smartphone backwater until then, became the most vibrant market and today it's the most penetrated and has the highest ratio of smart to non-smart of any of the major regions.

The curious thing about this vast market is that it's still not truly open. There are technology and political reasons why some platforms are permitted to sell in one region or not. The iPhone is not available on either the largest Chinese operator or on the largest Japanese one. It's largely absent from India because of distribution (i.e. subsidy) and much of South America. Even in the US, the iPhone is still, after five years, not available on one of the top four operators and has only reached another less than a year ago.

What intrigues me is what would the market look like if distribution were not an issue. What if there was equal choice to all buyers. We can't test this question directly but we can ask. But there is some pattern we can look at in the US data. Thanks to recent revelations at the Samsung vs. Apple trial we can see the effect of increasing distribution in the US.

The data on smartphone market share by carrier can be blended with data from carriers about iPhone activations (which are a proxy for sales, see note below) to give a more precise figure of market share in markets where iPhone participates.

For example, when the iPhone was only available on AT&T, one could measure iPhone market share vs. the global smartphone market, or the US smartphone market or within AT&T alone. Some assumed that the AT&T share would be reduced once the product would become available on Verizon or other US carriers. However there was no appreciable drop. Share in Q4 2010 was 63% at AT&T and it was 63% a year later after the iPhone was available for four quarters at Verizon.

So the share of iPhone within those operators which carry it tells a story independent of distribution.

The following graph shows the share of the iPhone vs. Samsung in the market defined by its availability. (I.e. the volumes of smartphones sold by AT&T throughout the time period, Verizon Q1 2011 to end and Sprint in Q4 '11).

The share of iPhone thus defined shows a slight decline but it's an overall number that is remarkably resilient as distribution increases and is remarkably high overall. Note that globally, the iPhone gets only about 17% share of smartphones--a value that has not varied greatly since mid 2009.

So at least in the US, on carriers where it's available, the iPhone is holding on to a significant share. In a global market it's expanding distribution but not yet covering the world. As a consequence it's keeping up with overall market growth and staying between 17% and 20% share.

The big question is what will happen if and when its availability matches that of Android in terms of points of sale. Or even that of BlackBerry or Symbian. Is America a different market from the rest of the world? It was different in being isolated while Symbian roamed globally. It was different in being a launch platform for BlackBerry and then iOS and then Android. But now that iPhone is beginning to be widely available there, will it be exceptional in how it rewards Apple?

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Note:

1. Activations data can be seen next to Apple's testimony of US sales in the following graph. Note that more phones were sold by Apple than were activated in total of the life of the product. 86 million sold and 80 million activated. This implies that an analysis based on activations undercounts the iPhone. 

Android has had unprecedented growth. Based on activation announcements, it's possible to estimate that thus far, about 370 million Android devices have been activated. The total number of devices in use is a lower figure which depends on replacement rate and retirement rate. This total number of devices in use at year end is estimated in the following chart.

I added the blue line which represents what Google had as an internal estimate in mid-2010.[1] The difference between the two lines shows that Android's growth is far higher than what the company expected.  If the company itself did not expect this growth, it's unlikely anybody else did either.

Unexpected, exponential user growth is usually accompanied by a dramatic positive improvement in the finances of a company and a higher return to shareholders. The curious aspect of Android's success is that it has not had an impact on either. The market has not "discounted" the half-billion anticipated Android users into a price for Google shares that reflects this growth. It can only imply that those users are not very valuable.

But why would there be such a disconnect between the number of users and their value?

In order to answer this question we have to come to grips with what I call "Android economics". We need to understand how Google uses Android to make money and whether it is succeeding and if it's not, why not.

In many ways, the Android business model is straight forward. It's an extension of the existing Google business model: Revenue is obtained from Search, AdSense and the applications that enable these two.  In the case of Android there is also revenue from app sales (Google Play a.k.a. Android Market) and from AdMob. Of course, all these revenue sources (except for Play) are sold through other mobile channels that include alternative, competing platforms. They are present on iOS, Symbian, BlackBerry and even embedded OS phones ranged directly by carriers. For each of these alternatives, Google pays for placement of their search as the default search in the browser.

To Google, total search revenue from iOS is far higher than it is from Android. That's because iOS users engage more with their devices and there are not yet a large multiple of installed Android users vs. iOS users.

But it would make sense that having your own platform would be more economical because there would be none of these placement fees. In this sense Android is another "channel" for distribution of Search and AdSense. But one which may be a lot cheaper.

However, it turns out that it does not work that way. Android has other costs.

In fact, Android's distribution costs might be higher than other channels. What we have to understand is that all of Google's channel revenues have a "cost". The revenue from a particular distributor of search results that Google generates is offset by the cost to acquire the terms. You can think of it as Google paying for the queries through a revenue sharing agreement. Google does not get search terms directly and depends on distribution. Overall, it pays about 50% of revenues back to distributors. In the case of its own web sites the rate might be lower, perhaps 40%.

Google even has a term for it: Traffic Acquisition Costs or TAC.

This revenue sharing in exchange for search terms extends to Android. Google pays about 40% TAC to Android distributors of those searches. But since Android is owned by Google, who does Google need to pay for traffic? Who is an Android distributor? Who gets the revenue share?

Google does not make a secret of it: network carriers and device vendors (OEMs) receive revenue share. From the latest earnings conference call:

Yes. I mean, again, I'm not going to talk about specific of the TAC on mobile. But as you know, we get people using our devices both organically as well as through our distribution partnerships with carriers and OEMs. And typically, the OEMs and carriers participate in some of the economics that are on the Android marketplace or Google Play and some of them participate in the economics around Google Search just the way we would do syndication on the Web platform, which you do with many partners around the world. We have similar deals on the mobile front.

- Nikesh Arora, senior vice president and chief business officer at Google Google Management Discusses Q1 2012 Results - Earnings Call Transcript - Seeking Alpha

Arora made another point in the quote above. Not only is there revenue sharing with carriers and OEMs for Search and AdSearch but also for Google Play (app and content sales.)

Device vendors and carriers get a cut. Google's model has always been one of giving a cut of revenue to their upstream distribution. It just might be surprising to hear that device vendors like Samsung and carriers get a piece of Search and apps.

This basic observation leads to a series of questions:

• How much is paid out and to whom?
• Is that revenue sharing sustaining the ecosystem? Do vendors create Android devices and do carriers push Android to consumers because they get this revenue share or is the amount insignificant vs. device margin? What about tablets? Why haven't Android tablets they taken off as Android phones have? Are the economics to blame?
• Is this a competitive advantage vs. other platforms? Does Windows Phone compete with revenue share for Bing? Is Microsoft offering a bigger carrot (as well as a stick?)
• How does this economic picture show up in Google's financial and stock price performance? Or, more precisely, why doesn't it?
• And, finally, what conditions create a virtuous cycle of growth and what conditions could turn it into a vicious cycle of decline? Is there a lurking factor which would cause Google to benefit greatly from this user base or is there an inherent point of failure in the model?

I'll be answering these questions in a series of posts this week.

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Notes:

1. Google's internal documents were leaked as part of the Oracle trial (Exhibit 1061). They can be found by using Google search with the following search term: "OC quarterly review".

During the first quarter this year HTC, RIM and Nokia all surprised investors with bad news. The effect is evident in the share price of these companies which, in the case of RIM and Nokia is around book value, and in the case of HTC, neared 12 month lows and a 70% drop from peak.

These "misses" in earnings and expectations are on top of the already woeful news from Sony Ericsson and Motorola, which have not had profits for years and LG, which has been borderline since late 2009.

In combination, this seems to imply a dearth of profits in an industry that is, by all measures, booming. Units are up 7% with smartphones up 47%. Revenues are up 20% and overall profits are up 52%. This are exceptionally strong numbers. Few industries can measure growth in double digits.

So if the industry is booming but the majority of participants in the industry are loss making (and surprisingly so) then what is going on? There are two answers: new market disruption and low end disruption.

The new market disruption is the migration of a large number of demanding customers away from phones-as-voice-products to phones-as-computing-products. The low-end disruption is the migration of a large number of less demanding customers from branded phones to unbranded, commodity phones.

The New Market Disruption

The new market disruption is evidenced by the shift of fortunes to Apple and Samsung and away from every other device maker. Here is the profit picture:

Of the vendors tracked (public companies who report mobile phone divisional performance), Apple obtained 73% of operating profits, Samsung 26% and HTC 1% [1][2].

The "share of profit" picture is potentially misleading because it could imply that the profits available are a constant. They're not. The absolute profits picture below shows how the industry actually expanded available profits by quite a lot. Two years ago the vendors generated profits of $5.3 billion in the first quarter  and last quarter they generated $14.4 billion.

Seen this way, the story isn't so much that Apple "took the profits from the incumbents". Rather, it's that Apple created a vast new pool of profits. And one need not look far to find out where they came from: operators. These profits were mostly carrier premiums for the iPhone 4S.

Before shedding tears for operators, consider that although this does amount to a current transfer of profits from carriers, the decision is a popular one. Hundreds of operators have made it. It's unlikely that they all colluded to be robbed. Indeed, they willingly hand over these premiums because the iPhone ensures a competitive advantage or preserves their customer base from churning. The calculations that go into a decision to range the iPhone are compelling enough that 250 operators made the decision (though, crucially, there are still 250 who have not).

Following this value proposition to its logical conclusion would suggest that the industry is rewarding those who can supply computers-as-phones which preserve the cash flows of what is essentially a trillion dollar data services business. Vendors which cannot offer this solution saw their businesses implode. At least on the high end.

The low end disruption

Simultaneous with this shift of the high end to smartphones-as-app-and-service-platforms came an explosion of growth in unbranded phones. As Apple led and most brands followed the new market, the old market of voice-oriented phones was abandoned to new entrants offering cheap "good enough" phones. Nokia tried to preserve its volumes and margins there but it's becoming increasingly difficult.

The following chart shows how the "Other" vendors have come to make up about 44% of the market.

Note that although this "feature phone" segment is not growing, it is still a large market (250 million units a quarter). The entrants in this market are numerous (perhaps in the thousands) and they are offering white label and unlicensed knock-off products. They are also offering unregulated (i.e. without IMEI numbers) products which are technically illegal and sold mainly in underdeveloped countries which have no incentives to enforce regulations.

This is a consequence of feature phones reaching the point of being "good enough". The feature set and quality are adequate for voice, text, games and even media playback and are priced at $30 or less.

This commoditization of the low end is pressuring what would normally be the fallback cushion under an underperforming smartphone business. The crisis for the incumbents comes from not only being unable to shift to the new market as fast as needed but also from not having cash flows from a low end that was thought to be sustaining.

This combination of two disruptions is why we see an explosively large and growing market failing to reward all but two of the participants.[3]

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Notes:

1. You can download, view and interact with a motion chart for the industry data here. All data is sourced from company filings except for some estimates where data is missing.
2. Operating profits are sales minus cost of sales minus operational expenses attributed to the business. When not available, opex is estimated as a percent of total in proportion to sales. Note that operational income excludes taxes, depreciation and other capitalized costs.
3. We cannot say that the thousands of low end entrants are unprofitable. They are probably enough profits to sustain them and even to attract more entrants, but we have to also recognize that there are likely to be very low margins.

Q: 37 million units of iPhones shipped. When do we run into the Law of Large Numbers? What are the growth opportunities coming up?

A: 37 million is a big number. It was a decent quarter. It was 37 million -- more than we'd ever done before. We were pretty happy with that, but let me give you the way I look at the numbers. As I see it, that 37 million for last quarter represented 24% of the smartphone market. There's 3 out of 4 people buying something else. 9 out of 10 phone buyers are buying something else.

Handset market is projected to go from 1.5 to 2 billion units. Take it in the context of these numbers, the truth is that this is a jaw-dropping industry with enormous opportunity. Up against those numbers, the numbers don't seem so large anymore. What seems so large to me is the opportunity.

What we're focusing on is the same thing we've always focused on. Making the world's best products.

We think if we stay laser-focused on that, and continue to develop the ecosystem around the iPhone, that we have a pretty good opportunity to take advantage of this enormous market.

Q: The biggest opportunity is the emerging markets. Large portion of that is the prepaid market. Apple has done very well but the wholesale iPhone price point is nowhere near what we would expect in the prepaid market. How do you make it more affordable to those markets?

A: Those markets are critical. The smartphone market is projected to be 1 billion units in 2015, 3 years from now. 25% of that is projected to come from China and Brazil. Just two of those markets -- 25% -- obviously those are very critical markets, but there are others as well.

We've been very focused on China. We've had incredible success with iPhone -- we've gone from a few hundred million in revenue to last year with $13 billion. We've been really focused on trying to understand the market there and taking those learnings to other markets. As it turns out, not very many people agree with me on this, probably.

What I see is that there is a lot of commonality in what people around the world want. Everyone in every country wants the best product as it turns out. They're not looking for a cheap version of the best product -- they're looking for the best product.

In the emerging markets there are very big differences in go-to-market. In most of the developed market, the carrier owns most of the distribution. In emerging markets, the retailer has most of the distribution. The whole go-to-market has to be changed significantly. Last year, we covered price points in the subsidized markets from $0 on up. That doesn't translate to zero in the prepaid market, but we're covering more price points there.

The paramount thing is the product. It is the focus. Of course distribution, we've recognized the difference there and in purchasing power. Unlike many people, I don't subscribe to the premise that prepay is prepay is prepay. We convinced China Unicom to try to postpay. It wasn't big there but they tried it and it's working really well. It's great for everyone because customer gets cheaper phone and carrier locks in a customer. It's a different way to look at the issue and it's been successful in China.

When Apple introduced the iPod in 2001, when we launched the iTunes Music Store and launched that on Windows, the iPod created a halo for the Mac. For 23 straight quarters we've outgrown the market on the Mac.

The halo that was created by iPod for the Mac, was created in developed markets. It was created in the US, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada. It didn't work nearly to the same level in Eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa, China, Latin America. People were already getting music from their phones. The world changed for us when the iPhone was launched.

The iPhone introduced Apple to millions of people -- our brand -- to people who had never met Apple before. Now, it's interesting to look -- take China as an example -- last year the Macintosh grew more than 100% in China, year-over-year. Not on a big base, but 100% is pretty good. The market grew 10%, so we outgrew the market 10x.

The iPhone is creating a halo for the Macintosh. iPhone has also created a halo for iPad. You can definitely see the synergistic effect of these products, not only in developed markets, but also in emerging markets where Apple wasn't resonant for most of its life.

Via: Apple CEO Tim Cook Speaks at Goldman Sachs Technology Conference - Mac Rumors

AT&T's intent to acquire T-Mobile USA is subject to regulatory approval. Will regulators look at the deal through the lenses of sustaining the traditional industry's profit allocation or through the lenses of device-led disruption?

In theory, regulators are to make a determination on whether the deal will reduce customer choice. But the question is really choice of what? The focus is presumably on the choice of service plans. That's understandable, however coupled to that choice is the choice of devices and even more importantly, the choice of platforms.

The trouble is that US consumers have never had much choice and the US wireless marketplace has been a minefield of incompatibilities and obstacles to market forces.

To begin with, US carriers maintain multiple incompatible network standards. Phones which work on one network do not work on any other. A Sprint phone won't work on AT&T or on Verizon. In fact, some Sprint phones won't work on all of Sprint's network as it still uses the iDen standard legacy from the Nextel acquisition. Even the iPhone which is designed for the AT&T network does not handle T-Mobile's version of 3G. So a consumer cannot make a decision on devices independent of a decision on carrier. This is a phenomenon unique to the US[1].

Secondly, in the US carriers charge for incoming minutes and have shunned pre-paid customers. There was a time when SMS messages were not compatible between networks, which led to the emergence of RIM as the only wireless messaging solution available, though initially not to the average teenager.

Thirdly, because of the multiple incompatible standards, network coverage in the US is still abysmal. Each carrier has had to build out parallel (incompatible) networks at great expense using non-standard equipment over a vast landmass. The result is not only a very expensive network whose capex demands high service fees, but a very poor quality network which is always both spotty and capacity constrained. Operators are therefore keen to lock customers in to post-paid plans to ensure cash flows that drive capital allocations. This is essentially an upmarket flight which does not encourage low end innovation.

These idiosyncrasies are rooted in historical regulatory rulings that led operators to create a uniquely American wireless market. The key regulation was that the US shall have no single wireless standard. In the spirit of laissez-faire this may make sense. But the result has been failure of the common good. This is sharply contrasted with other developed countries which (with notable exceptions) deliver superior service with high efficiency.

The US is so unique that it developed its own "Galapagos syndrome". Few global brands can be bothered to invest in it. Vodafone tried to play in the US with Verizon, but its minority position offered no leverage because Verizon spent the better part of a decade avoiding global networking standards. Now T-Mobile is desperate for an exit after trying to leverage the foothold it paid dearly for and failing to offer devices that capture users' imaginations (because they were railroaded into another incompatibility with 3G). Conversely, no US brands have been able to expand internationally. US operators are non-entities abroad, even in what would be natural expansion territories like Latin America or the Caribbean.  Those markets belong to European investors today.

Given this background, it's very likely that regulators will look at the deal in terms of balancing what is essentially a deeply flawed, cobbled together industry.  Companies can argue that they are rationalizing through consolidation but regulators can argue that "choice" is decreasing. These arguments are mostly moot. The problem is that the US wireless market is balkanized and byzantine.

It's therefore perhaps stunning that the platforms that are currently winning in mobile computing are American: iOS and Android[2]. Note further that none of these winners came from the world of wireless or telecom. These new points of profit condensation in the industry entered from a different industry: computing. But are they now pursuing telecom-compliant strategies? Arguably no. I choose to call them mobile computing and not phone platforms specifically because they will tolerate the cellular regimes as long as they need to, and no longer. Once they will reach the perch of power, the industry will conform to them, not vice versa.

---

Notes:

1. Japan has a similar problem but less pronounced.
2. Microsoft is still in the running as is Palm, both American.

Here's a wonderful chart from The New York Times:

Will Apple Put the iPhone on Other Carriers? - NYTimes.com.

Although the population of Android users is near in size to the population of iPhone users, the concentration in one carrier shows how distribution agreements hamstring platform choice.

The chart also shows how the iPhone had a huge effect on smartphone adoption at AT&T and how it sucked the oxygen out of the segment for competitors.

It is possible that we'll see more Android at AT&T and a lot more iPhone everywhere else, but on balance, the chart shows how exclusivity distorted the market.

It sounded like Tim Cook was really relieved to announce in the earnings conference call that:

We are not under a contractual exclusivity now in any country in the world. The last one was the United States. We have moved away from those.

...

What I've said before and we have seen this in every case, literally, that we've done, is where we've moved from an exclusive carrier arrangement to a dual- or multi-carrier arrangement, our growth has changed significantly and our market share has increased.

A month ago I wrote an exposé on the problems I felt Verizon was facing with their smartphone strategy: Verizon Strikes Out in Smartphones [Updated]

Given new information on subscriber growth and the relationship between Verizon and Apple, it's time to look back and assess how the conclusions are standing up.

The conclusions I drew were that Verizon had three strikes against them:

1. The iPhone has stolen their growth
2. They are facing the prospect of a single OS platform supplier
3. Android is not competitive vs. iOS

Did iPhone really hurt Verizon?

I pointed out that based on retail sampling data from ITG and what we know from AT&T own sales data, that iPhone at AT&T was outselling Android at Verizon by a ratio of 2.5 to 1.

The latest comScore data closely matches the assumed units of Android shipped by Verizon. Here's why: The comScore data shows the number of active users of each platform. So, for example, as the number of Android users at Verizon grew, it follows that the new users had to buy new Android phones. However, you can also sell more phones than just those for new users. Some phones are going to go to replace those of existing users.

When it comes to Android however, all the Verizon Android devices are pretty new, having been purchased less than a year ago. Replacements would only be sold for damaged or lost devices not covered by warranty.

So from comScore the change in subs at Verizon comes out to about 2.2 million and my original estimate was about 2 million. That's pretty close.

On the other hand, if you look at the chart, you'll notice that the number of iPhone users at AT&T grew by a similar amount (about 2 million). However, AT&T activated over 5 million. That means that about 3 million devices were upgrades. This makes a lot of sense since we know that iPhone is the bulk of AT&T smartphone users.

This is highly supportive evidence that iPhone at AT&T did indeed outsell Verizon Android by at least a factor of 2. Each of those phones came with a 2 year lock-in so indeed AT&T did manage to "steal" growth from Verizon.

Another data point in support of this conclusion was provided by Turley Muller in a comment.  AT&T smartphones make up a significantly higher proportion of contract subs at 44% vs Verizon at 23%. Effectively, as a result of their sweetheart deal with Apple, AT&T got double the penetration of smartphones than Verizon since these devices are targeted only to contract subscribers. Those are high ARPU customers that either moved from regular voice plans or switched from other carriers.

So far, the first conclusion seems to be holding up pretty well.

Was Android a strategic constraint to Verizon?

Verizon revealed that they had been negotiating with Apple at least since 2008 and that they were testing the phone for a year. This is not as big a surprise as it may seem. Deals of this kind easily gestate for years. The commitment may not be made until the last minute.

Nevertheless, my point was about the fact that Android was making up to 75% of Verizon's smartphone volume in Q3. This might be a strategic constraint. But "so what?" you may say: AT&T's dependance on iPhone was even greater.

That's precisely my point though. As we've seen with the shift by Apple to multi-carrier distribution, AT&T is now facing serious constraints on growth and the share price is suffering. Although Verizon did not deal with Google as a direct supplier, they were at risk of having much of the IP on their network at least orchestrated by a company that was not always aligned with their strategic goals. Much the same predicament AT&T is facing now.

The tale of AT&T and iPhone does lend support to the premise that Verizon felt a bit too constrained by Android hegemony on its network.

Is Android Competitive with iOS?

This last point was supported by the data showing a widening higher sell-through rate for iOS vs. Android on comparable addressable markets. Although the data has been confirmed with survey data, there are issues with this interpretation. First, because the addressable base for iPhone is higher at AT&T with the post-paid contracts being more popular there, iPhone had an easier time getting sold. Second, because 3/5 of the phones were upgrades.

The jury is still out but the apparent pent-up demand (admittedly anecdotal) for iPhone on Verizon does seem to show that given similar pricing, and a similar demographic/geographic addressable market, people do prefer the iPhone.