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This doesn't make any sense. What would you say if the whole industry had a loss, but one company? Then what, that company would make a negative % of profit? It doesn't make any sense, it doesn't show anything, it's just a useless number.

Not that I have any knowledge in those things, but isn't market share showed usually in revenue (or units sold), and for a good reason?

/edit: or you could take another view on this: loss is not profit, it's loss, so it should not be counted when you count profit. Then showing % of profit would make sense, but it could never be over 100%.

But then you wouldn't have an attention-grabbing, click-baity headline! Where's the fun in that?

It makes perfect sense. If you haven't read the whole thread, where the math is explained, I don't know how to help ya.

@adampk17: I didn't say the math was wrong. Math doesn't care what you feed it and if you feed it something that doesn't make sense, it will give you back a number that doesn't make sense as well, like in this case. Just like in statistics, if you torture numbers long enough, they will tell you any **** you want.

Let me rephrase my question from the previous post, so you understand it fully.

Let's say we have industry that have just 2 companies in it. Company A made 10 dollars profit, company B made 50 dollars loss. What % of industry profit would company A had? 10/-40 = -25%, right? What if the company made loss of 10 dollars, how would you calculate the % profit of company A then?

Yeah, you are right, it's a great number and it tells us everything.

Yep, math can be manipulated to come up with all kinds of numbers. Nobody is disputing that.

In this case some people find the 104% figure interesting and it does add some perspective on the smart phone industry in Q3. Perhaps you can't do much with the number after that, but it isn't up to you to determine if a figure has any value for the rest of the world.

Froz wrote:

Let's say we have industry that have just 2 companies in it. Company A made 10 dollars profit, company B made 50 dollars loss. What % of industry profit would company A had? 10/-40 = -25%, right? What if the company made loss of 10 dollars, how would you calculate the % profit of company A then?

"It was my understanding there would be no math."

But since there is, I think the equation adampk17 cited earlier is slightly off.  If you want an A's share as a pecentage of net, I believe you need the (A-B)/A formulation, and if B is a net loss, then you're subtracting a negative and the signs still work out.

The original example:
A = 10, B = -2
(10-(-2)) / 10 = 1.2, or 120%

Your new first example:
A=10, B= -50
(10-(-50)) / 10 = 6, or 600%

Your new second example:
A = -10, B = -50
((-10)-(-50)) / (-10) = -4, or -400%

Note that in your second example, there is no profit; the negative sign indiicates that A lost money, but four times less money than B.

@Ludi: no, I don't understand your math at all. To get percentage A has in all profits, you simply divide A by the total profit of the industry. So, in my example, it would be A/(A+B). Why would you divide A-B by A exactly?

And my last example was about B having 10 dollars loss (point is that the loss would be the same as A's profit and you can't divide by zero).


Back to the point - to me it would be much more helpful to read that all companies, not counting Apple, achieved a loss in average, instead of showing that weird 104% number. Personally I don't think it is really truth, or at least it's misleading (probably because it's taken from one quarter and not a full year ending in that quarter, also I wonder where they actually got the numbers from, do those companies even publicly show net profit from smartphones separated from everything else they do?). And even if it's true, it says much more about Apple's competitors and how hard is the Android market right now, than it says about Apple itself.

Froz wrote:

And even if it's true, it says much more about Apple's competitors and how hard is the Android market right now, than it says about Apple itself.

The number (104%) wasn't meant to trumpet Apple. It's just one way of looking at the Q3 data, an observation. If you think it was then you assigned that meaning to it.

Froz wrote:

@Ludi: no, I don't understand your math at all. To get percentage A has in all profits, you simply divide A by the total profit of the industry. So, in my example, it would be A/(A+B). Why would you divide A-B by A exactly?

I might have to dig into my statistics book again to work this one out.  It's been a long while.