Samsung is winning big right now in terms of revenue but, as it turns out, a substantial amount of that revenue is being generated thanks to deals with the company’s long-time rival, Apple. That’s because the iPhone manufacturer uses many of Samsung’s components in its iOS devices, according to a recent study conducted by Counterpoint Technology Research at the request of The Wall Street Journal. In fact, the trend is hardly new since as much as 35 percent of Samsung’s revenue over the course of the last year actually came from Apple’s product sales. With that said, that trend also looks as though it will continue, as no company has yet found a viable solution to the ongoing problem of component and component resource shortages.
As to the numbers backing that up, Apple is expected to sell 130 million iPhone X devices through much of 2019. Samsung, meanwhile, provides OLED display technology for those devices at around $70 per display. However, the company is also supplying enough secondary components that the actual revenue generated for Samsung with each iPhone X allegedly adds up to around $110 per device sold. That means Samsung could effectively see an income of around $14.6 billion from iPhone Sales alone. If Samsung only moves the expected 50 million of its own Galaxy S8 devices for that same time frame, the handset maker would actually accumulate around $4 billion less from its own devices – with considering only for the revenue created by the components.
It’s important to mention here that those figures do not, of course, include income from Samsung’s other devices – such as the newly released Galaxy Note 8. They also don’t account for the total income generated by the Samsung Galaxy S8 sales since the study focused summarily on the revenue created by component sales. The chipset side of Samsung’s business, in the meantime, arguably represents a far more important portion of its overall survival strategy since it accounts for the vast majority of the company’s growth and revenue. That part of Samsung’s overall business is also likely to continue growing as the company dedicates more of its resources into new chips for mobile. Bearing that in mind, it may be a bit surprising for some to learn that the company makes so much money from the very rival it finally managed to surpass earlier this year in terms of profitability.
