Market Analysis: AAPL 6/4/2014

Here's How Apple's Doing in The Market

ComScore's April U.S. smartphone market share data shows Apple AAPL +1.35% the leading vendor at 41.4%. Its share is flat from March, down 0.2% since January and up 2.2% from a year ago. Samsung continues to strengthen its number two position of 27.7% by increasing its share every month since February last year when it was 21.3%. LG, Motorola and HTC have been trading the third to fifth spots over the past six months and are currently at 6.5%, 6.3% and 5.3% share, respectively. I have created a Google Doc that has information going back to October 2011 with comScore data.

Source: comScore

Google's Android and Apple’s iOS continue to be the number one and two platforms respectively and have gained a combined 270 basis points of share to 93.9%. Google’s and Apple’s gain have come at the expense of Blackberry while Microsoft MSFT -0.05% has increased its share slightly from 3.0% to 3.3% in the past year.

U.S. smartphone penetration approaching 70%

ComScore estimates that 69.6% of mobile users use smartphones which is up from 58% a year ago. Not surprisingly growth in the smartphone market will have to come from other regions around the globe. Statista has created a chart from an Ericsson mobility report that shows the Asia-Pacific region adding 2 billion smartphone subscriptions between 2013 and 2019 with Central Europe/Middle-East/Africa adding just under 1 billion. North America will add the least at 110 million.

Source: Statista via Ericsson mobility report

To give a bit more perspective on where mobile subscribers reside below is a chart from the Ericsson report that North America and the Middle East have the fewest number of users at 365 million while Asia-Pacific (ex-China) has the largest number of subscribers at 1.355 billion and China has 1.25 billion.

There have been and will always be concerns about Apple’s high-end strategy which leads to market share concerns. It is worthwhile to note that the company’s largest revenue increase for the March quarter came from Japan at 26% year over year with China at 13%. However, these were skewed upwards by the addition of NTT DoCoMo and China Mobile, respectively, so it will be another year to get a better read on how the iPhone is doing. But then again a larger screen iPhone should be out by then so growth should remain strong in those regions.