RIM And Apple To Grab 66% Of Cellphone Profits, Report SaysRIM And Apple To Grab 66% Of Cellphone Profits, Report Says

If you're a CIO thinking about which mobile phones to deploy across your enterprise, you need to check out a Deutsche Bank analysis showing that RIM and Apple will grab huge percentages of the industry's total operating profits this year. Apple's share of those profits will jump from 20% in 2008 to a projected eye-popping 31% in 2009, but guess what - RIM will do even better."When you look at sales of the iPhone or Blackberry as a percentage of total cell-phone sales, they are still a tiny smidgen of the one billion phones estimated to be sold this year," says Seeking Alpha, yet those two companies are "increasingly taking a disproportionate share of industry profits, mostly at the expense of Nokia's diminishing handset operation profits."

The article is based on a report from Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff, who says that in spite of Apple's terrific performance with its iPhone, RIM will move to the head of the pack in snatching the largest share of the industry's operating profits with a stunning 35% projected share for 2009.

RIM's 35% projected share for 2009 shows a huge leap since 2007 (8%) and 2008 (19%). So with Modoff's forecast that RIM and Apple will account for 66% of cellphone industry profits in 2009, CIOs with questions about which vendors are going to have staying power will have a very clear answer.

And as Seeking Alpha notes, "Such a massive shift in control of industry profits is unprecedented and speaks to the growing value of software in the cell phone industry. It also speaks to the missteps of the traditional handset manufacturers (only Samsung seems to have its act together) and the end of unbridled growth for the industry."