From ExtremeTech: If mathematicians are collectively devices for turning coffee into theorems, as Alfréd Rényi once remarked, phone patents and purchase agreements are devices for turning patents into gobs and gobs of cash. Devices and technologies are so intertwined, it’s not unusual to see companies that compete in the same market and for the same customers buying and licensing technology from one another. It’s well known Samsung and Apple collectively extract virtually all of the profit from the phone market for themselves (and Apple gets the lion’s share of the profits, despite shipping far fewer devices per year than Samsung does). In fact, things are lopsided enough Samsung may make billions more in profits from owning the iPhone X’s screen than it will off its own Galaxy S8 devices, even though it earns much more per-device on the Galaxy S8.
Samsung is expected to earn $110 per iPhone X sold, compared with $202 in estimated earnings based on the value of the technology in the Galaxy S8. That’s the word from Counterpoint Technologies, a research firm that worked with the Wall Street Journal to develop its predictive model. The company estimates Apple will sell 130 million iPhone X’s through the next 20 months, compared with 50 million in cumulative Galaxy S8 sales. The OLED panel in the iPhone X itself has been estimated to run Apple has much as $120 per phone, compared with $45 to $55 per LCD-equivalent screen. Phones account for two-thirds of Apple’s yearly revenue, and the iPhone X is supposed to be a major boost to that bottom line.
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