If you thought that the iPhone was eating shares of other manufactureres in the market, then you were wrong: it’s doing more than that. According to a new report by Canaccord, Apple’s phones took 93% of the industry’s profits last quarter, which would be a major chunk of the $18 billion in profit it made in the last quarter when it sold a record 74.5 million iPhones.
“We believe the strong iPhone 6 replacement sales should continue during C’15, as we estimate only 15% of the current estimated 404M iPhone installed base has upgraded to the new devices. We also anticipate continued strong share gains for the larger screen iPhones from high-tier Android smartphones during C’15 driving strong growth in the iPhone installed base and model the iPhone installed base growing to 487M subscribers exiting C’15 up 20% Y/Y.
Longer term, we anticipate a gradually moderating rate of growth for the installed base from C’16 through C’18 and estimate 650M iPhone users exiting C’18. We note this base would only represent 1/3rd of an estimated 1.82B global premium smartphone subscribers anticipated by C’18.
Finally, we anticipate steady long-term iPhone replacement sales within this growing iPhone installed base, and we believe this combined with our modest installed base growth expectations position Apple for steady sales of roughly 210M-215M iPhone units annually between C2015 to C2018″.