Source: Canaccord Genuity. Click to enlarge.
FORTUNE — According to Canaccord Genuity’s Michael Walkley, Apple (AAPL) and Samsung managed last quarter to split all the world’s profits in mobile phones — 56% Apple and 53% Samsung — and come up with a total of more than 100%.
That only makes sense if you accept two premises:
- That money lost in a market should be treated as “negative profits” — an oxymoron if I ever heard one.
- That you can ignore every Chinese mobile phone manufacturer, even though as a group they accounted for more than 30% of units sold in Q3 2013 (see pie chart).
Ignoring ZTE, TCL and the other Chinese manufacturers was a matter of necessity, according to Walkley, due to the lack of what he calls “available profit metrics” (i.e. quarterly reports).
The question of how market researchers account for so-called Chinese white box devices — often cheap, underpowered knockoffs — has become a sore point for companies such as Apple that don’t believe their high-end products are in the same market.
For an Apple-centric take on the issue, see Daniel Eran Dilger’s The curious case of IDC, Gartner & Strategy Analytics’ PC, phone & tablet data on Apple posted Saturday on AppleInsider.com.