Apple vs Samsung vs LG vs Huawei mobile profits are not even close

It ain't over until the fat lady sings, and she sang over Apple's record quarterly profit to the tune of a $20 billion fanfare. While that's not as much as analysts expected, and a bit too close to the $18.4 billion it booked on the wings of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus upgrades, it is still a record profit in the company's history... any modern company's history. 

That chunk of change boosted Apple's cash hoard to $285 billion, and, now that its overseas holdings can be repatriated with a low tax rate, Apple's only trouble will be how to spend this on future products and services. The reason for Apple's breathtaking quarter? Why, the iPhone X, of course. While iPhone unit sales overall were a bit less than the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus sales in their first quarter, the X took a large share in the nix, boosting the ASP to nearly $800 per iPhone - another record, as you can see in the chart below.

To put things in perspective, we are listing how much did the most profitable phone-crafting juggernauts made in the all-important holiday quarter from their mobile business. More than 90% of Apple's profits, and about 86% of its revenue came from the mobile division's products and services, so we left Macs and other gadgets in the total, as they barely make a significant contribution to the bottom line. Huawei hasn't broken down its mobile division profits yet, so we went with its Q3 average profit per phone estimates of $15, multiplied by 41 million, or the number of handsets it sold in Q4. The same goes for Oppo, and its 32 million units sold at $14 of average profits apiece, or Vivo, with 24.5 million phones sold at $13 profit a pop.

Granted, this is traditionally a boon quarter for Apple, as it released all of its three new handsets in the fall, but still the vast difference between its Q4 income, and what the second most profitable company in the business derived from phones, is pretty demoralizing.