Whoa - For a moment I was convinced $7.4B was revenue. That's profit which is impressive to say the least.<p>Next somewhat unexpectedly 2/3rd of the profits are from mobile division - Smartphone sales mainly. Wonder if all the parts Samsung supplies to Apple make them so little profit (they sell displays, DRAM, Flash and make Apple's SoC for them) that they could just stop doing that and their bottomline would be hardly touched.<p>I am sure I am misreading something here - or may be margins are just razor thin in everything Samsung sells to Apple.
By comparison, Apple just posted $8.22 billion of net income. [<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/technology/apple-profits-rise-24-on-iphone-5-sales.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/technology/apple-profits-r...</a>].<p>Approximately $5.1B of Samsung's profits came from their phones; this is despite Samsung being an extremely diversified company. I cannot find what proportion of Apple's profits come from sales of iPhone and iPads; they do, however, make up a majority of their revenue.
> <i>Earnings from the chip division, where Samsung competes against Toshiba Corp and SK Hynix Inc, dropped 28 percent to 1.15 trillion won as prices of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips sagged, though a recovery in NAND flash chips, widely used in mobile devices, helped offset the weakness.<p>The company said it expected DRAM oversupply to run on into the current quarter, but sees a tight NAND flash memory market.</i><p>Intel had the same problem. They switched markets from commodity to monopoly. They're still around.<p>I've noticed Samsung's ability to crush it since about March of last year and have been long Korean tech dominated ETFs to hedge my Apple stock - which I recently sold and subsequently shorted. Samsung is Dell with profits. It in combination with Android will destroy the iOS ecosystem.<p>Here's to profits with openness. May the Microsoft strategy once again prevail.<p>Apple was good while it lasted and it brought a lot of great tech forward by a few years. But they're out of screens to attack - just like Microsoft is really out of operating systems to attack. Disclaimer: I'm long Samsung, and will be long Google once more if the price drops further.<p>You never bet against Linux in the long term. Just like you never bet against capitalism or democracy.<p>Linux always wins.
This is why I am bullish on Google. I think motorola with Google will eventually figure it out and will take half of those $5B+ mobile profits from Samsung.