According to this post at iSmashPhone, currently the biggest handset manufacturers are (in no specific order):
- Apple
- LG
- Motorola
- Sony
- RIMM
- Nokia
- Samsung
No doubt that Apple is making very high profit because of hot iPhone sells, as you can see from above chart, although Apple’s revenue is not as high as other big cell phone companies (about 8% only) but Apple’s profit is about 32% of the total industry profit.
And I think this is the reason why Taiwan’s two big brands, Acer and Asus are trying to join this cell phone game: they also want to benefit as much as Apple does. Early this year, Asus CEO tried to forge an alliance between Garmin and Asus, planing to get enough RD strength to compete with current market player and soon they did release first product, the Garmin-Asus G60 on July.
Taiwan has been focusing in hardware for a very long time and did very well at past, but past success does NOT equal future success. In the era of Web 2.0, all Taiwan’s biggest companies really need to pay more attention in software, not hardware. Most manufacturing and hardware orders of OEM or ODM, only get profits not higher than 5%. Apple’s high profit should be the Innovation lessons they learned from Apple.
I can see the ambition which Asus trying to achieve, but frankly speaking, as I know this device is not good enough to compete with Apple’s iPhone, not even with HTC’s product. The scope of SOFTWARE is not just the software itself, they really need to think and plan more as Apple did.
