operator

This interview took place on the eve of the launch of the Galaxy S4. Anouch Seydtaghia is Deputy Head of the Economic & Finance Section chez Le Temps Geneva, Switzerland.

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Q: How can you explain that Samsung organizes such a huge event in NY for the S4?

A: The S4 is a very important product as it's probably the second most profitable mobile phone in the world. Samsung is trying to position it as a premium product and is using every means available to do so.

What are your thoughts about the huge marketing budget of Samsung?

Samsung's marketing budget has been a constant percent of their sales (approximately). As sales have risen, the budget has risen. This is not considered a normal situation if sales grow very rapidly but Samsung seems to consider x% of sales to be appropriate spending level. Note that Apple's marketing has fallen as a percent of sales while its sales have grown dramatically.

If we read the media, we see a lot of speculation about the features of the future S4. Can we now compare that to the expectations before a new iPhone?

There are speculations about all phones, from Nokia to HTC and BlackBerry. I don't see the speculation to be different between all the major companies.

Can Apple regain the lead in the smartphone market? If yes, how?

Apple had leadership in the phone market for two quarters (see graphic below.)

It's a myth to think that Apple was dominant for any extended period of time. The top spot is very difficult to obtain unless a company has a large portfolio of products which are sold in all markets. Apple has less than half the operator distribution of Samsung and keeps only one new product in the market each year.

Apple also has a very high price due to the distribution model it uses for the iPhone. The primary buyers are operators who made large volume purchase commitments a few years ago. The iPhone strategy can be summarized as "skimming" where they pick the most profitable customers rather than "penetration" where there is a focus on market share. It's therefore very surprising that Apple was able to ship as many phones as it did.

Is there a difference between what Samsung and Apple invest in R&D?

Of course, but we don't have details. Samsung Electronics has to develop semiconductor processes and build large fabrication plants. Apple has a vast software engineering operation. Apple has iTunes and web services while Samsung has appliances and TVs. The two R&D efforts are vastly different.

What could be the new features in the next smartphone?

The most important innovation in smartphones will be a product that is not a smartphone. The category will be eliminated through a disruptive approach just like all other technologies that have come before it. My expectation is that when it comes it won't be recognized as important or relevant.

As a follow-up:

- Thank you very much! So do you mean that for Apple, marketing is just 1% of sales?

It's difficult to compare the two exactly.

We don't have specific data on Apple's marketing. We have either Advertising or SG&A (which includes marketing.) Samsung reports “Marketing Expenses” every quarter but these figures appear to be the sum of Ad spending, Sales Promotions, Public Relations and a portion of “other” expenses as a part of SG&A.

You can see a comparison here:

What seems to be happening is that Samsung increases its spending in proportion to sales while Apple grows marketing a bit more slowly.

Basically, Samsung is treating SG&A as a "variable" expense which is tied to sales whereas Apple is managing it as organic growth.

The difference might be that Marketing at Apple is mostly an internal effort and thus depending on headcount while Samsung might be spending mostly externally. If costs are internal then it would be hard to pare them down if sales slow whereas if they are external then they can easily be made variable.

I've received comments suggesting that Samsung's approach is unorthodox and that the quality of marketing cannot be maintained if it grows as quickly as Samsung has grown it. This is a matter of speculation however.

LG Electronics has acquired HP's WebOS for an undisclosed amount. When last it changed hands WebOS was part of Palm which was purchased for $1.2 billion in 2010.

Palm has thus been effectively divided into several smaller pieces distributed as follows:

HP will own:

• Support of existing Palm users
• Palm back-end assets including source code, infrastructure and talent
• webOS patents

LG will own:

• Stewardship of the Open WebOS and Enyo open-source projects where the source code resides
• Associated talent
• WebOS websites
• License for IP related to webOS

LG announced that it plans to offer an "intuitive user experience an Internet services across a range of consumer electronics devices." In an interview, the CTO of LG said that given the current situation with Android, LG does not plan on making smartphones running webOS but will use it in televisions and other devices such as cars, signage and appliances where there are no embedded OS's. "We'd like to secure a software platform across all devices."

Most commentary regarding the deal focused on the use of the platform for TVs but management seems to consider all devices, perhaps even phones, at some future date, to be webOS targets.

The TV however seems to be low hanging fruit today. The TV as an app platform will be the new ecosystem war and no platform today has a lock on the developers or users. The way this rivalry will shape up will not mirror other device classes for the same reason that current device classes are platform silos.

PCs, music players, tablets and phones all have different super-majority platform leaders. The association of a platform with a device class depends first on the distribution model, which favors a specific business model which favors a specific vendor which favors a specific platform. As each device is distributed differently, a different platform takes precedence.

Consider that the PC has historically been purchased by IT departments which led to a monoculture of Windows which led to a persistent leadership for Microsoft.

The music player created dominance around iTunes mostly because the distribution model for music labels was baked-in. With network effects, the iPod quickly gained and perpetually retained market share leadership.

The smartphone business initially favored Symbian and BlackBerry because they had the market access through operators. After the touch UI became dominant (and incumbents failed to respond in a timely manner), Apple and Google took leadership as soon as they accepted the operator distribution model. Android in particular is especially resonant with operators and has been developed with their requirements in mind.

The tablet business is more like the PC business but without enterprise requirements or patterns of purchase. This has meant that app/content ecosystems and retail distribution were the key gating factors. The story is still unfolding but so far Microsoft has not found a foothold while iOS and Android and Amazon have.

That leads to the question of how will smart TVs be sold and which business model (or go-to-market strategy) will succeed. Steve Jobs pointed out the difficulty in trying to deliver innovation into a value chain dominated by cable companies which can effectively block it. A TV which is an application execution device rather than a content terminal will require a re-definition of the category. That will require a re-positioining of this product. Few companies are able to do that. [See also my post Tele Vision from mid-2011].

Which brings us back to the question of webOS. As long as LG sells TVs as content terminals they might not obtain much value from webOS. If, on the other hand, LG were to use webOS to re-define their televisions to be something else entirely, namely software execution devices, sold differently and hired to do a different job than a TV, then webOS becomes not only necessary but potentially a source of great prosperity.

[Kaoru] Kato, president of NTT DoCoMo Inc., said that the firm would want to add the iPhone to its lineup of serviced smartphones if it could form a mutually beneficial contract with Apple, Inc.

Apple requires that carriers servicing its devices sell a fixed amount per year. Katō said that his company could handle such quotas if iPhones accounted for approximately 20%-30% of its overall smartphone sales.

via NTT DoCoMo President Interested in Servicing iPhone — BrightWire

When thinking about an iPhone launch, especially with a new operator, the crucial question is what is the minimum order quantity (MOQ). Some of the iPhone production is sold direct (as in the case of orders coming from Apple's online store) but the majority of units are sold via operator who order in batches.

This issue came to light when Sprint's order was leaked in late 2011.  I discussed the order size at the time and put it in context. I concluded that Sprint MOQ was on average 7 million/yr., ramping with 4, 6, 9 and 12 million over a four year period.  I concluded that this was not a particularly aggressive gamble.

Data published since then shows that Sprint actually sold 6.3 million during the first year, well ahead of my expected minimum order of 4 million and above even the expectations for the second year of sales. So far then Sprint and Apple gauged minimum demand quite accurately.

I also showed that the Sprint MOQ was probably indexed off their sub base. I suggested that, based on subs data at the time, Sprint was committing to roughly 13% of its subs buying an iPhone every year. This was indexed off the data showing that 17% of AT&T subs were buying iPhones every year and 10% for Verizon. (I also assumed that this run level would be ramped over time).

The updated totals for the 12 months ended October 2012 are 19% of AT&T subs purchased an iPhone, 12% for Verizon and 12% of Sprint. The performance is shown in the following graph:

Which leads us to think about how the MOQ for the iPhone is calculated. If we assume Sprint and Verizon performance is typical it would imply that an operator like DoCoMo would be required to purchase iPhones at the rate of about 10% to 12% of its sub base each year, modulated to some degree by a ramp.

NTT DoCoMo had 60.7 million subs in September 2012. 10% is about 6 million. Is Mr. Kato's quote above of 20%-30% of smartphone sales consistent with this?

In an earlier interview (in July) Mr. Katō also stated that the target for smartphone sales in the year to March 2013 was 13 million. 30% of that would be 4 million units.

This suggests that the iPhone MOQ for DoCoMo is only about 6% of subs. (4 million) Perhaps this is the basis of negotiation for an iPhone deal. Apple may have held out for 10% subs/yr. with Sprint on the basis of performance of the iPhone in the US but might be willing to settle for 6% subs/yr with DoCoMo, at least for the first year.

The MOQ figure as percent of subs for China Mobile would also be an interesting point of debate.

 

In 2011 Apple increased the availability of the iPhone by adding operators. In 2012 Apple increased availability by bringing the phone to operators more quickly. The question is: how much did iPhone 5 availability increase, exactly?

There is a way to find out. As an approximation, Apple periodically reports the availability of new iPhones by country. For example, Apple stated that they reached 100 countries for the iPhone 5 before 2012 ended. They also gave similar launch data for the iPhone 4S. Graham Spencer did a good job showing how country roll-outs changed over time.

However, country-level availability is not ideal because countries vary greatly in their ability to absorb iPhones. Announcing availability in Mauritius is not nearly as important as announcing Madagascar. A better measure would be to track the countries' populations being added, or, better still, the populations which subscribe to operators who have a distribution contract with Apple.

Which is what is shown in the following graph:

I plotted the "potential buyers" as the number of subs addressed by iPhone-carrying operators in the launch countries according to the time when the launches happened. I did so for the iPhone 4S in 2011 and the iPhone 5 in 2012[1].

Now we can address availability as the area under each of these lines.[2] The figure for the iPhone 4S adds up to be 100 billion "subscriber-days"[3] and for the iPhone 5 it's 130 billion subscriber-days during Q4 2011 and Q4 2012, respectively.

That's a handy measure: the iPhone 5 was 30% more available than the iPhone 4S. The big contribution was having China and Indonesia available during the fourth quarter rather than in January 2011.

There are a few observations which follow:

First, note that the increase in availability (area between the orange and blue lines) occurred both early and late in the quarter. The early period was mostly due to early launch in the US and the later period was due to earlier launch into China.  China buying patterns are different than those in the US due to differing festive seasons so the bulk of Chinese buying may not happen during the fourth quarter.

However, delivery of product to China started earlier and there was a burst of buying (two million units in three days.)

Production should follow the availability schedule so it would be sensible to reduce production once the pipeline is full. Note that supplier cuts rumors surfaced right around the increased availability date of mid-December. Last year the rumors surfaced in November.

Increased availability does not always lead to increased sales but the iPhone 5 was constrained for longer than the iPhone 4S so it's possible that demand was therefore higher.

Increased distribution does not always mean increased production. However, Apple's investment in production tooling doubled year/year so there is a possibility that production did increase.

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Notes:

1. Subscriber data is approximate. See addressable market discussion here.
2. The measurements are for the calendar quarter only, as bounded by the vertical lines.
3. A subscriber-day is a measure of availability where one subscriber has access to buy the product for one day.

If you are available January 29th and/or 30th in the San Jose area we could use your help.

We need eight people to help with registration, microphone relay, guides.

We also need five people to act as Camera Operators - we will provide Cameras and training, but any experience is a bonus.

We also need an Audio Mixer Operator – experience as a DJ is enough.

 

In exchange for a day of hard labor you'll get:

• Access to event (when not busy)
• Access to reception and meals
• A collectable Asymconf t-shirt

Send email to volunteer@asymco.com to apply.

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.

Having reached 100 million iPads shipped in 2.5 years the natural question is how long will it take for the next 100 million iPads?

The ramp of cumulative units shipped is shown below.

 

I also added the equivalent ramp for the iPhone. [The last data point for the iPad is based on an estimate of 16.5 million units in Q3 which may need revision depending on company reporting.]

The next 100 million will depend to a large degree on the success of the new iPad mini. To make an estimate we have to realize that there are several aspects of the tablet market which differ from the phone market and that therefore the predictive power for previous data is weak.

First, the channels are different. Tablets are sold as media consumption or "computing" products. They are not sold as communication devices. Therefore operators have few incentives to promote and subsidize them. They do participate in the distribution but not with the same level of commitment. That means less "push" and opportunity for discovery. Apple has an advantage in this case with their stores and brand value. The lack of operator engagement and lack of points of sale might be one reason why Android tablets have not ramped as quickly.

Second, for some competitors, the tablet itself is a loss leader and acts more as a terminal into an ecosystem rather than a product in itself. In cases where tablets are given away it's possible that consumers might own one for each platform or ecosystem. This is similar to the game console model where the cost of the console is not a barrier to many avid gamers. This means that penetration of tablets can reach above 100% of users in some markets. Although network connections (i.e. SIM cards) can and do reach well above 100%, the number of phones in use by one person simultaneously is bounded.

Third, the lifetime of the product is as yet undetermined. Phones tend to last 2 years. This is due to evolving standards as well as high wear and tear and breakage or losses. Tablets are not as "mobile" and are less likely to be used and the basic functionality does not evolve as rapidly. It's possible that replacement rates for tablets will follow more that of notebook computers than phones. Perhaps between 2 and 4 years. I suspect most iPads purchased are still in use today, including the first version. There will be some obsolescence from system upgrades, but the older systems will keep going.

Some of these aspects of the product could lead to slower growth and some to faster growth. That and the fact that it's a completely new category with business and consumer and educational and vertical applications makes it a difficult product to forecast.

Having said that, the product is extremely resonant with buyers. The growth to 100 million is testament to that. The liquidity of the product, with no carrier locking and no pricing illusions means that it reaches all parts of the world quickly. So there is no obvious upper bound on the size of population who might buy it. The new price points and form factor may lead to a wave of new adoption, similar to the impact the iPod mini had on the iPod line.

There are still many factors that can slow growth, especially production capacity, but I believe that the iPad could growth between 50% and 80% which would mean 100 million more iPads could be sold by the end of 2013.

[The following was originally published on LinkedIn.]

The US is in the forefront of smartphone usage. This has not always been the case. Five years ago only 3 percent of US phone users were using a smartphone, lower than the global average. At the time Palm and BlackBerry were the prominent devices in the US while in Europe Nokia's push with Symbian and Microsoft's licensing of Windows Mobile led to a smartphone adoption rate of about 7%.

All that changed with the iPhone. After 2007 the US began to rapidly catch up and eventually overtook all other regions in terms of smartphone adoption. The latest data from comScore Mobilens shows that the US is now effectively 50% penetrated. The following chart shows just how quickly this happened.

Image (media01.linkedin.com)

In December 2009 only 17% of Americans used a smartphone as their primary phone. As of August the total reached 49.8%. By today the US is effectively a majority smartphone usage country and it looks like there is no slowing. We might very well see the US reach saturation with 80% smartphone usage in another two years.

Of course, the US is not the first country to reach this threshold. Some northern European countries were there earlier, but North America is the first major region to get there. That means over 115 million smartphone users in one market. As a result, the US has become the crucible of the whole smartphone market. It's where platforms are most concentrated in use and therefore the most sensitive to the effects of that usage. That leads to more innovation, more discovery of new use cases and more ecosystem growth. Quite simply, it's where competition is most heated.

This prominent position implies that the US could now be seen as a leading indicator of global trends. It might allow a keen observer to predict what will happen from US data. So what does the mobile platform rivalry look like in the US?  We are fortunate because the data is finely grained in the US. We have montly updates from comScore and we get specific platform penetration data. The following graph shows the shares of the major platforms since late 2009.

Image (media01.linkedin.com)

It becomes immediately evident that BlackBerry has lost a huge part of its user base to Android and iOS. In 2.5 years share when from about 42% to 8%. In raw numbers that's 11 million users that switched to another smartphone.

Looking closer you can also see a consistent growth in share for the iPhone since mid 2010 with a slightly higher rate of increase of share than Android in the last few months. The problem is that this pattern of rapid decline in RIM and moderating growth in Android is not necessarily mirrored globally.

RIM just reported an increase in total users during the last quarter (from 78 to 80 million subscribers.) Google also recently reported 500 million Android activations globally with no apparently letup in growth.

So there seems to once again be a disparity between the US and global platforms. Do we take the US market to be anomalous or is it a pre-cursor to global trends?

Certainly the US market is in many ways unique with a very low rate of pre-paid usage and a relatively high ARPU and average device pricing due to subsidies. However, the global trend has been to increasingly mirror the US not vice-versa. The iPhone has radiated out of the US in terms of usage and so has Android. Attempts by other platforms to make inroads in the US have been unsuccessful. Symbian failed to gain a foothold and it seems Windows Phone is stumbling as well. Both of these platforms have had more success outside the US. The US operator subsidy model has also been "exported" more than pre-paid has been "imported". By 2007 Europe was moving away from subsidies as prices of feature phones were coming down and 3G was still in its infancy. That was reversed as the large screen smartphones became the device of choice. In addition to device and operator trends, most apps originate in the US and the major social media platforms are all American-based. In other words, the modes of usage are being conceived in the US.

On the other hand, the US is still a tiny percent of total consumption. It represents only about 6% of all phone users. Chances are that prices for devices in the US (especially the iPhone) can't be sustained for 5 billion consumers. Then there are "cultural" considerations where regions cling to their own usage habits and perceptions of value.

So it's still an open question of whether the US is the leading indicator for how platforms might change globally but I would watch this data very carefully. When it comes to mobile platforms, it might be that if it plays in the US it will play globally.

Matteo Fumagalli is a student of economics at University of Insubria, Italy. He is writing a thesis for a bachelor's degree analyzing the smartphone industry.

He asked me to answer the following questions:

-First question is about you. Why did you found Asymco?

I founded the company to develop software, mainly apps. I began writing the blog as a way to drive traffic to the site. I would have preferred to build a blog only but did not think it was possible to earn any money doing that so I treated it as a hobby. Even after the site became more visible I changed from development to consulting and did not expect that writing in itself could be self-sustaining. It took about two years before I felt comfortable with the idea that I could do writing and speaking exclusively. I am still exploring additional business models however.

-You worked 8 years as analyst and business development manager at Nokia and you anticipated their current crisis with your first post on Asymco. Do you think Nokia will have the chance to recuperate, and eventually what will be the role of Windows Phone?

Nokia may recover or remain independent, at least. But it will be far smaller. The idea of a return to dominance or 40% share seems very unlikely. As I pointed out in the first post, the organization cannot cope with the new marketplace. Large organizations require extreme stress and damage to change. It's a phenomenon at all levels of society that success results in rigidity. From the individual to the nation to the civilization, success makes change very, very difficult.

Windows Phone is an attempt to create a third ecosystem. I am concerned that the logic of having a third alternative is not solving a consumer need but an operator need. In other words, consumers are not asking for a third option and when they are presented with a third option they are not excited by it. The consumer does not think in terms of increasing their options. They decide once every two years which phone to buy and that is the end of their thinking on the subject. By focusing on the operator's needs the platform is fundamentally mis-positioned.

What Windows Phone needs to be positioned as is either as fundamentally different, solving a different job for the consumer. Or fundamentally better along a new dimension like price or convenience. These are some of the claims it makes but they are very weak claims right now.

-What about RIM, other company which is going through difficult times? What do you think about their decision not to move to Android and stake everything on their closed OS?

The decision to remain with their own platform may sound risky but it's a simple decision about retaining their business model. RIM is not a general-purpose manufacturer. They have always made an incremental margin on services, messaging and email. For them to use a third party OS would force them to build within the constraints of that OS or platform. That would result in a difficult competitive environment and not one where the company could sustain margins vs. larger competitors. In other words, the company faced two risky alternatives. They chose the risk they were more familiar with or the one that they already had an operating company organized for.

-Recently Apple lost market share in Europe and China favoring Android. What will be the impact of iPhone5 on this situation? As expert of Apple strategy, do you think Apple has done something wrong in these last months?

Apple lost market share when considering the smartphone market. I agree with management (and I've argued this before they did) that the market for the iPhone is all phones, not just smartphones. In that context, Apple is increasing its share consistently. Since Apple has only one product in the market (with some residual older versions as well), it's very seasonal. It would be natural to see variance in share through the year. What should be watched is a four period average performance. Overall, Apple is growing its iPhone business faster than the overall phone market so it follows that its share is increasing. I see a long-term potential for the iPhone having 20% share of all phones. That would give it an installed base of over 1 billion users.

-Smartphone penetration is reaching 60% and we probably talk about saturation in next 2 years. What will be for you the future role of tablets and phablets, they will be threaths of substitution for smartphone or maybe an opportunity to offer complementary products?

The evidence so far is that buyers don't mind having more than one device. It makes sense if each device is hired for a different job and it cannot be general purpose enough. We've seen this phenomenon with mobile phones where penetration in many markets is above 100%. That implies that even a basic feature like a phone number cannot serve all the needs on one person. To me it seems likely that one person will have more than one device and more than one form factor.

-What do you think about legal battle between Apple and Samsung? There will be consequences also for Google and Android?

I defer to my blog post Deus Ex Machina. Legal battles are not strategy.

-What will be the role of the possible entry of Amazon in the smartphone industry? It's too late for them?

Amazon is a retailer. I find it hard seeing a retailer becoming a platform provider. Not only is retail a difficult to expand business model internationally, but it's hard to imagine partners being comfortable building an ecosystem on top of retail. Retail is not sufficiently flexible as a business model.

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. 

The number of BlackBerry phones sold fell 41% year-on-year in the last RIM fiscal quarter. Sequentially the fall was 30%. Though surprisingly poor, I note that Nokia's smartphone business fell even more dramatically last quarter (down 50% y/y and 39% sequentially). LG also saw a 44% decline in unit shipments in Q1.

The history of smartphone shipments for the largest vendors is shown in the following chart:

From forecasts made by Huawei it's probable that they overtook RIM in the last quarter, dropping RIM to 5th or 6th ranked vendor in smartphone units.

RIM's 7.8 million units is the same level of sales as it had in early 2009. The total market was only about 250 million units per quarter then. It's around 400 million today. A quick calculation shows that RIM's smartphone market share has fallen from a peak of 22% to about 6%.

RIM's stock performance reflects this performance relative to the market.

Hardware revenues were $1.652 billion. Matt Richman calculates the average hardware revenues for the BlackBerry of $203. I include service revenues in my ASP calculations (for Nokia and Apple these are also significant values) yielding $309 per BlackBerry. The history of total revenues, revenues per phone and operating margins are shown below relative to competitors.

Operating margin tells the most sobering story. As I've often repeated, historically no company has survived dipping into the grey zone.

To reiterate, the logic of irrevocability in this industry is as follows:

Success depends on three conditions being met by the vendor's products:

• consumers trust the platform's promise
• operator see the product as creating value to their core business
• developers offer investment to innovate on top of the platform

If all these factors are present, the vendor enjoys a virtuous cycle of growth. If any of these is lost, the others are also likely to be lost as well creating a vicious cycle of decline.

Loss of operating margin is an early indicator that at least one condition is not met. Usually, a failure of consumer trust leads to a drop in purchases which leads operators and distributors and retailers to flee and then developers defect.

It's been impossible to recover from this tailspin so far. There is a procedure which works in theory: accelerate downward by investing in a new platform. The move is counter-intuitive but essential in re-building trust, quality and relationships.

However, the reason it does not work in practice is that this struggle is not with gravity alone. While spinning downward, the company is also subject to competitive attack. Competitors fill the void and take customers into locked-in ecosystems. There is neither the time nor the ability to defend.

Cash runs out and customers are divided up between the survivors. Nokia and RIM face this scenario today.