Apple dominates the smartphone market; recently killing off RIM, Nokia,HTC, and more

Time after time Apple is ‘tested’ up against its competitors to find who really has the lead in the smartphone business. If you guessed right, Apple is the leader, and has been for years, at-least in the profits category. Companies like RIM and Nokia have been knocked off the charts with iOS and Android smartphones beginning to takeover.

When it comes to Volumes and Revenues, Nokia and RIM have decent sized shares. Surprisingly Apple volume block is smaller than Nokia’s, but they still hold the lead with revenues, barley keeping up with Samsung. If you think though, the smartphone business isn’t about the amount of phones sold or the total revenue. Its more about the profits. That’s how they they pay workers, engineers, and more who work for their company.

The profit portion of the study found that Apple is three times larger than Samsung, and RIM/Nokia are almost non-existent. HTC and Motorola are the only two companies that rank ‘up top’ with Samsung and Apple.

If you want to go back to Q1 last year, both RIM and Nokia were huge pieces to the study. Samsung’s profits were actually quite close to that of RIM, and even Nokia. Apple was still the large leader taking in more profits than all the other companies combined.

Each and every year Apple is more untouchable. We are reaching the iPhones 5th anniversary and the profit margin is just unfair to other companies. If the iPhone 5th generation is a big hit among consumers I would only expect the margin to expand. Next year don’t be alarmed if Samsung only owns a small percentage of profits, just like Nokia in 2011.

This data comes from market research firm VisionMobile. Special thanks to Asmyco for creating the visualizations though, they really help!