For more analysis of Apple & the industry, join us at ACTIVE 2025.

Author: Horace Dediu

Biggest mobile loser? The non-smart phone

Yesterday comScore published survey results for EU5 (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK) on smartphone use and installed base. The headline is very similar to what would be written about the US: Android had phenomenal growth over the last twelve months. I also noted that the apparent growth of Google (16.2% share change) seemed to be matched by an apparent decline of Symbian (-16.1% share change.) However the reading of the data is not so simple.

In order to understand what has happened to usage, it’s much more valuable to look at consumption and the actual number of users rather than change in share of a subset of the market. Consider the following charts:

The bar chart shows that Continue reading “Biggest mobile loser? The non-smart phone”

A comparison of P/E compressions

Following the presentation of growth/PE of comparable companies in the previous post, here are charts showing the Growth vs. P/E as a scatter plot. I highlighted the quarters pre-crisis as red dots and the quarters post-crisis as blue dots. I also added a vector line showing the migration of the average (centroid) of the pre-crisis values to post-crisis values (11 points averaged in each case).

Continue reading “A comparison of P/E compressions”

Growth profiles of 13 companies

The previous article showing the profile of Apple’s growth vs. its P/E prompted a similar review of a set of comparable companies. The cohort is composed of:

Apple
HP
Dell
Lenovo
Acer
Sony
Samsung
LG
Nokia
RIM
HTC
Microsoft
Google

The following charts are a simple representation of P/E (line chart with left scale) with Net Income growth super-imposed (bar chart with right scale.) The time period is 22 quarters; 11 quarters after the crisis (i.e. quarters after the one ending in Sept. 2008) and 11 quarters before the crisis (quarter ending 12/20/05 through the one ending 6/30/08).

We made one change to the growth data from the previous post where the Net Income growth is not quarterly year-on-year but average of four quarters year-on-year. This reflects the fact that P/E is also a trailing twelve months’ earnings. It also has the benefit of smoothing the growth data making it easier to discern.

Here are the charts:

Continue reading “Growth profiles of 13 companies”

Why Carol Bartz was fired

Occasionally I write articles titled “Why CEO X was fired.” You can read one here, and here and here.

These are allegorical stories. I don’t base the opinion on evidence but on perception of what’s wrong with a particular company’s strategy and then try to trace the point of strategic failure which should have triggered management change. Of course, the reasons are often something else, probably mundane or “political” in nature.

The objective therefore is to analyze strategy and more precisely strategy failure.

So, Yahoo! What went wrong?

Before we answer that, we should know what went right. Yahoo, like Google, depends on advertiser revenues. For that, it sells the behavior of its users. It processes over 25 billion events every day and builds a database (estimated to be in 10s of petabytes) to mine for information that is, hopefully, worth something to advertisers.

But in order to get user behavior it needs to provide compelling reasons for user participation. For that, Yahoo licenses content and offers communication services (among other things.)

This sounds like a reasonable business model. So what could go wrong? Continue reading “Why Carol Bartz was fired”

The proliferation of mobile platforms

While some mobile platforms are being withdrawn from the market, others are being introduced. The net is that there are more mobile platforms announced for 2012 than ever before. The following chart shows the lifespan of the platforms that I can recall.[1]

Continue reading “The proliferation of mobile platforms”

Quantifying the phobia of owning Apple shares

As the market continues to exhibit signs of instability, an interesting paper[1] identified a correlation between the U.S. stock market and an index of the U.S. Financial Conditions. This index measures the assessment of the probability of a crisis.

The conclusion is that an imminent crisis mentality pervades equities markets today and implies that pricing is largely disconnected from fundamentals. On this blog we’ve discussed the topic of fundamentals and marveled at how pricing seems to be largely exclusive of it.

The case is made by the following chart: Continue reading “Quantifying the phobia of owning Apple shares”

The case for the iPad's future

The question of low end disruption should be a concern to any manager. It’s one of the most important sources of growth and has led to a vast amount of wealth creation.

Apple was an early low end disruptor by selling personal computers at a fraction of mini-computer prices. Toyota also offered “cheap” cars as an entrant in the market. Pixar made blockbusters for a lot less than live action studios. Google offers good enough office software without a license. Finally Microsoft built its whole business on low-end business software at knock-down prices.[1]

All these entrants made fortunes often at the expense of entrenched incumbents. Disruption grows the pie but also transfers a lot of value away from existing competitors.

So it should not be surprising that new products like the iPad should be scrutinized for their vulnerability to low end disruption. Brian Caufield asks the question if Apple has any future with the iPad given the potential for $99 tablets.

The question is indeed why not introduce an ultra-cheap tablet, for example from Amazon, which makes up for the low price with an innovative business model like selling content or user behavior data. After all, game consoles are sold this way. This is the classic razor/razor-blade business model.

The answer to why not is actually not simply that the economics don’t work. They might work some day even if they really don’t today.

The answer to why not is that the iPad is not good enough.

Continue reading “The case for the iPad's future”

US smartphone penetration growth rate update

The survey data from comScore is in and it suggests that smartphone penetration increased by a significant 1.58%. It is now 35.1% with 82.2 million users.

The weekly new user rate was about 863k/wk during July or about 586k/wk average over the last three months. I plotted the weekly add rates for the last 18 surveys and overlaid the three month moving average.

The chart shows that there is an upward slope to the upper and lower bounds of the moving average. Extrapolating trend forward gives me confidence in projecting 50% penetration by July 2012.

Samsung's Polyplatform Paradox

Samsung has, over the years, shipped phones using almost every operating system it could get a hold of. That includes Symbian, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, LiMo, Android, PalmOS and OPhone.

As far as I know, today its portfolio includes Android, Windows Phone and its own Bada OS. The relaxed attitude to platform exclusivity at Samsung is in stark contrast with almost all other competitors who either for the sake of encouraging their own platforms or minimizing development costs maintained either one or two smartphone platforms.

Samsung justified their polyplatform strategy a few years ago by saying that different platforms are popular in different regions and as they did not want to be excluded from any market, they felt that being agnostic is the best policy.

The idea that platforms are not universal, but the result of provincial preferences is interesting. It’s a concession that “politics” plays a large part in mobile markets. However, for all the volume growth the strategy has produced, the strategy has not paid off in terms of higher margins or pricing power as the following chart shows.


Continue reading “Samsung's Polyplatform Paradox”