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So I read an article today which asserted the following:

Canaccord’s latest estimate shows Samsung making 15 percent of profits in smartphones, with Apple making 92 percent. (The numbers add up to more than 100 because everyone else in the smartphone industry loses money, so their share of the profits is negative.)

Upon digging further, I found another article which broke down the "smartphone profits" percentages as follows:

  • Apple: 92%
  • Samsung: 15%
  • Blackberry: 0%
  • Lenovo: -1%
  • Microsoft: -4%

How the heck does this work? Wouldn't the total sales revenue / profits be 100% and each company would have a representative value of that?

Haney
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  • Cannot see the full article... – Lost1 Sep 10 '15 at 22:20
  • @Lost1 you don't need to: I pasted all relevant data into the question. The profits add up to > 100% and include negative percentages. How? – Haney Sep 10 '15 at 22:23
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    Not that I do not believe you, what you wrote makes no sense. – Lost1 Sep 10 '15 at 22:24
  • I googled your first line of text. So, what they meant is that suppose, I make £100, you lose £20, then the total profit between us is £80, then I make 125% of the profit you make -25%. My profit ratio is my profit / my profit+your profit. Similarly for yours. – Lost1 Sep 10 '15 at 22:27
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    @Lost1 yeah but if the total profit was 1 and you made 100 and I made -99 you'd make 10000% and I'd make -9900% - how absurd. – Haney Sep 10 '15 at 22:29
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    Well, yeah, I agree with you. This is a bit stupid and misleading. – Lost1 Sep 10 '15 at 22:30
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    If Lost1 made 100 and Haney lost 100, you'd both have NaN% of profit. –  Sep 10 '15 at 23:31

1 Answers1

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Particularly in the press, people often do silly things with percentages, but the values you quote are possible. It appears they are computing the total profits of the industry and allocating it to the various companies. This would guarantee that the percentages add to $100\%$, but then it appears that the values were rounded to the nearest percent. Say the correct values were

  • Apple: 91.6%
  • Samsung: 14.6%
  • Blackberry: -0.4%
  • Lenovo: -1.4%
  • Microsoft: -4.4%

These add nicely to $100\%$ and would round to the nearest percent to give the values you quote.

Ross Millikan
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