No, Zhang Fei, "profit share" is not a "silly term." It is the only thing that counts in the long term. Your MARKET SHARE chart has nothing to do with profit share. A company can have the largest market share and go bankrupt by selling below cost. The iPhone market has not been touched in the least by price compression in the phone market. Sorry, you are just wrong. Apple does not compete in races to the bottom. Apple owns the majority profit share position in every market they compete in for the same reason, including PCs.
Actually, it does. When Motorola and Nokia were king of the hill, they had high market share and the lion's share of the profits. Their market shares shrank and those profits continued flowing, for a few years, as their products continued to be hot. Then their products went ice-cold and they started losing money hand-over-fist.
iPhones have not been affected, yet. They are still going through that honeymoon period. When it happens, it will seem sudden. But it's been a long time in coming, just as Motorola and Nokia seemed to fall off their perches suddenly. It wasn't sudden. They just gave their competition room by pricing their products too high. It's not a bad strategy for maximizing profits. But the fall from grace will not be pretty. My prediction is that in three years, AAPL shareholders will associate the good old days with a $50 stock price (without any splits, spin-offs or special dividends).
The guy is throwing darts at the wall. He lucked out on his Apple recommendation. I wouldn't trust his "profit share" guesses any more than his Blackberry recommendation.Jon Ehrlichman says: “Please correct me if I’m wrong but I was looking back over the Bloomberg and it says you’ve had an outperform rating on the stock since September 2008. That’s during period in which RIM has lost half its value while the S&P has fought its way back to even. Can you clarify that?”
Tavis’ response: “… No, that’s accurate… um… some stocks go up, some stocks go down. They’ve done much better internationally than what I would have expected and much worse in the US.”
Betty Liu: “Right, but I think Jon makes a good point that you’ve had this outperform rating for a long time on RIM. What would it take to make you change that?”
Tavis: [now angry and somewhat dismissive of the direct criticism] “yeah yeah, look… this would be an easy job if we all just looked backwards…. But, we don’t… and, uh, and, uh, so… you know, I think what it would take would be if there was any meaningful slowing in RIM’s international growth.”
“This would be an easy job if we all just looked backwards.” Well, Tavis, I think the point was that you’ve done a really bad job looking forward for over 2 years now. And it’s not like he upgraded the stock and then back-tracked. He just did nothing. He kept saying RIM was an “outperform” for the entire ride down to a loss of half the company’s market value. And now he says it’s still an “outperform.” What is any investor supposed to make of that?
Why does this continue to happen? Aside from no accountability, skewed incentives, and the basic personality types of the people who go into this line of work, there’s another factor at play. According to Tavis’ bio on Morgan Keegan’s website, he covers 20 companies including RIM. 20! How do you do that — really? How can you intricately have an opinion about a company’s ups and downs amidst a rapidly changing competitive environment? I think what Tavis did with RIM — which is exactly nothing in terms of changing his opinion — shows what happens.