Clearly displaying the volume vs profits dilemma of smartphone makers

As someone who loves numbers and graphs, I really liked the latest post from asymco.

Continuing its breakdown of which companies are making money in the smartphone OEM space, it's an estimated breakdown of the number of phones a company sells plotted against the profit made per phone.

The first thing to note that that in both graphs, it's the companies who ship the smallest volume who make the most profit per sale. (For clarity, the groups are split between those companies who provide their own operating systems, and those who use multiple OSes. NB The axes are the same scale. I've just shifted one for visual purposes.)

This makes sense as the more phones you sell, the harder it is to charge a lot of money for them as the majority of phones sold worldwide are featurephones.

For example, Nokia makes about $58 per featurephone it sells, and $189 per smartphone. This is one of the reasons that although it sells a third of the world's phones, Nokia's average profit per device is terrible.

The other significant point is that the volume of each block displays that company's overall profitability.

As can be clearly seen, Apple makes more profit than the rest of the industry put together.

[source: asymco]