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Next Tuesday, Apple will report results for the March quarter. The Street is expecting the company to sell in the vicinity of 32-33 million iPhones for the quarter. That’s a lot of smartphones. But it might not be anywhere close enough to make the company the calendar Q1 smartphone champion.
ACI Research analyst Edward Zabitsky asserts in a research note that Samsung in the quarter sold over 40 million smartphones, grabbing the title of global smartphone unit king.
And the competition from Samsung, the analyst asserts, continues to intensify. He notes that the company on May 3 will launch the Galaxy S3, the latest edition of its flagship smartphone, which he thinks will include an internally developed quad core processor called the Exynos 4412, their own LTE/WCDMA baseband processor, and a retina quality, low-power Super AMOLED+ display, also made by Samsung.
Zabitsky, who might be the one true bear on Apple in the analyst community, contends that Samsung, and not Apple, is the low-cost producer in smartphones. He says that Apple’s purchasing power is matched by Samsung – but he notes that Samsung designs and manufactures $60-$80 of components in every high-end Galaxy phone, while Apple designs about $25 of the components in the iPhone 4S. He notes that “Samsung’s internally sourced displays, processors, and memory require a low incremental cost to produce.”
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