So I read an article today which asserted the following:
Canaccord’s latest estimate shows Samsung making 15 percent of profits in smartphones, with Apple making 92 percent. (The numbers add up to more than 100 because everyone else in the smartphone industry loses money, so their share of the profits is negative.)
Upon digging further, I found another article which broke down the "smartphone profits" percentages as follows:
- Apple: 92%
- Samsung: 15%
- Blackberry: 0%
- Lenovo: -1%
- Microsoft: -4%
How the heck does this work? Wouldn't the total sales revenue / profits be 100% and each company would have a representative value of that?
Particularly in the press, people often do silly things with percentages, but the values you quote are possible. It appears they are computing the total profits of the industry and allocating it to the various companies. This would guarantee that the percentages add to $100\%$, but then it appears that the values were rounded to the nearest percent. Say the correct values were
These add nicely to $100\%$ and would round to the nearest percent to give the values you quote.