Apple Inc. (AAPL): Inconvenient Truth About Market Share Surveys

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) just can’t seem to catch a break. Even when it’s down, it continues to be kicked by misinformation and misleading data. Apple always seems to find itself on a short end of the various market-share surveys regarding smartphones.

For the last five quarters, certain market surveys that measure smartphones shipments have said that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is second in shipment numbers compared to Samsung. But when these numbers are put in context, Apple’s iPhone is still likely the most popular smartphones in the market. And while we don’t usually stand on a soap box about things like this, but we just had to bring this to our readers’ attention – as a public service.

Here is the latest breakdown of the various market-share studies, with yet another article written that shows a misleading headline. And you know what? We’re personally getting tired of seeing this market-share surveys which focus on the brand label. This seems to confuse some reporters and analysts, who fear that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is losing market share and is actually falling behind Samsung in the smartphone wars.

If some of these reporters could do a little bit of research, they might just find that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is not really hurting as much as they like people to believe.

Samsung reports that it shipped about 68 to 70-million handsets during the first quarter of 2013, nearly double of the Apple iPhones (about 37 million iPhones). We certainly understand that those numbers are very misleading. And the reason is simple – the high-level, premium-priced smartphone is not the only smartphone in a smartphone category.

It is clear to us that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has its lone smartphone, the iPhone, in a market-share comparison  with several Samsung devices. It likely might not be very hard to actually do an apples-to-apples comparison (yes, pun intended) of shipments of the premium-priced smartphones in the category – the iPhone, the Galaxy S4, the Nokia Corporation (ADR) (NYSE:NOK) Lumia 920 and the Research in Motion Ltd. (NASDAQ:BBRY) BlackBerry Z10, as examples.

It seems that for many of these surveys that the firm seems to conveniently group all the smartphones together and count those numbers – could they not get the numbers for each individual smartphone? And if they can’t, why do they consider it necessary to misinform and mislead those who pay attention to these surveys?

Why do you think firms like these don’t provide completely accurate information about Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and how its iPhone truly stacks up against  other premium-priced smartphones? Do you think there is an anti-Apple bias in these surveys and the subsequent reporting? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

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