Over the last few years, Apple has earned the lion's share of the profit from the smartphone ecosystem. How much of a share has always been a fun value to calculate, and even though it looks like an impossibility, the latest report from BMO Capital Markets suggests that Apple has taken 103.6 percent of the industry's profit.
Apple is taking more money out of the system than the laws of arithmetic suggest is possible.
How the available money for profit is calculated explains the anomaly of going over the 100 percent mark. Tim Cook and his team can thank Samsung's Note 7 for Apple's explosive share. Because the losses made by companies on their smartphone projects are included in the "profits available" calculation, there's more money in the system than the money handed over by buyers around the world. Once you include Samsung's increased losses due to the Note 7 debacle, Apple's profit goes over the 100 percent mark.
Yes it looks impossible, but arithmetic can do that sometimes.
What's more important to note is that Apple managed to bring in this level of profit on just twelve percent of the sales in the smartphone sector. It's the only manufacturer that has worked its hardware, public image, and marketing machine to such an efficient level that it can take this amount of money out of the ecosystem. That money can be used to fund more research, more development, and more design. Not only does that benefit Apple, but the competition has less money to fund those same resources, increasing the potential lead between the iOS and Android platforms.
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