iPod’s Domination No Problem for Samsung
Posted: December 28th, 2007, by Yunho Chung
Did you give your child an iPod for Christmas or maybe you received an iPhone yourself? Congratulations, you just supported the Korean industry. According to a recent Korean news report does an iPod Touch consist of up to 40% of products from Samsung or other Korean companies like Highnics.
Also the very much hyped iPhone shares many of the parts of an iPod Touch. With an estimated sales of around 9 million iPod Touch the coming year this means heavy revenue for Samsung. Especially since some of there more expensive parts (such as the flash memory) are from the company, they will receive more than 20% of the total production cost of around 150 USD per item. The customer price is around 300 USD.
Korea is traditionally a very strong mp3-player producing country and Korean companies like iRiver and Samsung was a long time dominating the flash memory based market. However, since the iPod phenomenon arose they have lost much of their own market share while the Koreans have moved to other forms of portable media players. But since Samsung is covering the market share loss by providing parts to Apple, Korea remains strong under the hood.
