Have a look around you. Go on.. can you see someone with a Samsung phone? Is it a Galaxy device? Yeah. It’s the success of the Galaxy smartphones that have helped to boost the profits of Samsung by a massive 76% in the last three months of 2012.
If you want to get into the exact figures, Samsung saw their net income hit a record 7.04tn won (which is $6.6bn or £4.2bn). Those are some big numbers, so it perhaps brings it into context when you consider that net income was 4.01tn won last year during the same period.
The mobile juggernaut shows no signs of slowing. It’s now the biggest smartphone maker in the world and they’ve doubled mobile profits. The mobile division now sell around a quarter of all phones in the world and have hit an operating profit of 5.44tn won, up from 2.56tn won last year.
More than half of the profit made by Samsung in Q4 was thanks to the sale of phones.
For more detail, dive into their earnings statement.
Good luck to them, I say. I still think it’s a bit of a shame about HTC, as they surely deserve a bit more of the pie than they have. Apple seem to be losing it a bit. The iPhone 5 is a nice phone, but it didn’t really push the boundaries, whereas Samsung had some genuine innovation in their latest string of products.
I also call into question Apple’s focus on locking stuff down. In the end, as the ‘general public’ get more used to smartphone technology, they are going to want to start to push the boundaries a little more than Apple appear to allow. It’s still relatively easy to root a Samsung device, and that will allow you to do pretty much anything the device is capable of. Apple seem to make it harder and harder to jailbreak with each OS. Really, what’s the point?
I’m still of the opinion that if I buy a device, it belongs to me and I can do what I like with it. I can stick it in the blender, I can draw faces over the screen with marker pen, I can put any apps I want on it, and I sure as hell can remove any soft restrictions the manufacturer imposes (at my own risk, of course). It really serves no purpose to make the determined jump through hoops to achieve something so trivial.