Samsung actually has a vested interest in the iPhone X being a huge success. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company stands to make around $110 from each phone sold, which all told could result in billions more than the company even made on its own most-recent flagship, the Galaxy S8.
To be clear, all that money will go to Samsung Group, the conglomerate, as opposed to specifically the mobile division of the company. Why the windfall? Samsung made the OLED display, NAND flash, and DRAM chips in the iPhone. It’s currently the only company capable of manufacturing these items at the volume that Apple needs, which means Apple has to buy the parts from Samsung.
If the iPhone X sells the way analysts think it will, that means Samsung stands to make billions of dollars off its competition. In fact, the Journal reports that one analyst thinks Samsung will likely earn $4 billion more from selling parts to Apple than it did from sales of its own phone.
“These are two of the largest companies on the planet deeply tied at the hip and directly competitive,” David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School, who has studied Apple and serves on Intel Corp.’s board told The Journal. “That makes this stand out compared with almost any relationship you can think of.”
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