“When the iPhone X goes on sale next month, Apple rival, Samsung, has good reason to hope it is a roaring success,” writes The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 3, 2017). The South Korean company stands to make $110 from each $1,000 iPhone X that Apple sells. The fact reflects a love-hate dynamic between the phone makers that is one of the more unusual supply chain relationships in business. While each company vies to get consumers to buy its gadgets, Samsung stands to make billions of dollars supplying screens and memory chips for the new iPhone—parts that Apple relies on for its most important product. “These are two of the largest companies on the planet deeply tied at the hip and directly competitive,” says one Harvard prof.
Apple and Samsung are expected to be the world’s two most-profitable companies in 2017. And they will depend on each other to get there. Apple needs Samsung’s parts to make the iPhones that accounted for 2/3 of the company’s $216 billion 2016 revenue. Samsung needs Apple’s orders to fuel a component business that delivered 35% of the South Korean firm’s total revenue of $195 billion in 2016.
The relationship grew after Apple moved into selling smartphones. Apple’s immense demand for parts—it sells more than 200 million iPhones a year—limits the field of possible suppliers. Samsung is one of a handful of semiconductor makers that can make a small chip crammed with extra memory capacity. And it is the only significant manufacturer of the organic light-emitting diode displays Apple has adopted to create the iPhone X screen.The relationship took an acrimonious turn in 2011, when Apple sued Samsung over patent infringement, accusing the Galaxy S of ripping off the iPhone’s design. Samsung countersued Apple with its own patent-infringement. Six years on, the U.S. lawsuit is unresolved.
Classroom discussion questions:
- Describe similar relationships between competitors in other industries?
- Why does Apple depend on Samsung so heavily?