The trial between Apple and Samsung is a case over patent disputes between two companies who are viciously fighting for the same market space. While in the long run this will probably be bad for consumers due to raised prices or limited products on one side or the other during the short run we’ve been finding out all kinds of fun details about the companies. The courts have insisted that both companies open up their sales books and give us a slew of new information on how each company is doing and how products were developed. While regular stock reports give us limited amounts of this date we’re actually able to see exactly how much of a product has now sold in a time period by both of these two electronics juggernauts.
Apple
Let’s throw out some fun numbers first. When it was initially released in 2007 there have been over 85 million iPhones sold within the United States. That would translate to 1/3rd of the population being able to have an iPhone at this point. (Keep in mind this does not count consumers who have purchased multiple cell phones for upgrades or due to broken devices.) Still enough have been sold to cover 1/3rd of the US population. The total combination of those sales have brought up over $50 billion dollars in revenue for the once nearly defunct PC maker.
For tablets Apple sold 34 million iPads which has sold over $19 billion in revenue.
Samsung
Samsung’s smart phones were not initially released at the same time. In fact their sales figures start up in June of 2012 and the numbers are a bit lower to reflect that. From June 2010 to 2012 (the end range both companies are using) Samsung has sold 21.3 million phones which ended up with $7.5 billion in revenue. While the Apple just had 3 version of the iPhone for sale during this time period Samsung had a few available on the market: The Galaxy Prevail, The Epic 4G, the Epic 4G Touch variant of the Galaxy S II, and a variety of Galaxy SI’s and II’2 sold in this time period as well. One clear difference between these two companies when it came to phones was the iPhone vs the Samsung RandomPhoneName. They’ve paired this down a little these days but it does seem to be a branding issue they had suffered from for some time.
For tablets the company sold 1.4 Galaxy Tab’s bringing in $644 million in revenue.
The Breakdown
Now you can’t compare the numbers of a 5 year release range to that of 2 years. When you break them down from June 2010 to June 2012 for both companies Samsung’s numbers are at 21.million with $7.5 billion and Apple has 60.1 million iPhones sold for $36.7 billion. On the tablet side there is no comparison with Apple selling 34 million compared to Samsung’s 1.4 million.
Now to the fan boys keep in mind, the comparison isn’t quite apples to oranges as we’re looking at Samsung vs iPhone on sales when the true breakdown most consumers watch are Android vs iOs. However this is a case about patents on hardware not the software that runs it so it falls squarely on Samsung’s shoulders.
Related Link: All Things D.
