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Sunday, September 9, 2012

Apple's iPhone component cost

iPhone's components account for 26% of an iPhone.

APPLE doesn't make the iPhone itself. It neither manufactures the components nor assembles them into a finished product. The components come from a variety of suppliers and the assembly is done by Foxconn, a Taiwanese firm, at its plant in Shenzhen, China. The “teardown” graphic below, based on data from iSuppli, a market-research firm, shows who makes what inside the iPhone, and how much the various bits cost. Samsung turns out to be a particularly important supplier. It provides some of the phone's most important components: the flash memory that holds the phone's apps, music and operating software; the working memory, or DRAM; and the applications processor that makes the whole thing work. Together these account for 26% of the component cost of an iPhone.


It's unclear how much Apple spends on software development, R&D, marketing, shipping, packaging and so forth.

Apple now commands the largest slice of the handset industry's profit share.

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