Apple 2.0

Covering the business that Steve Jobs built

Mobile phones: Who's up, who's down and who's moving sideways

October 5, 2010: 3:58 PM ET

Three years of pitched battle for share and profit reduced to a set of vectors

Source: Asymco

Asymco's Horace Dediu is a master of the art of turning bland data into eye-opening visualizations.

His latest, posted Tuesday afternoon, starts with two sets of data in two points of time -- market share and share of profit in 2007 and 2010 -- for eight vendors in the mobile phone space, from Apple (AAPL), the smallest in 2007, to Nokia (NOK), the largest.

At the suggestion of one of his readers, Dediu has plotted the data in two dimensions at the same time and divided the results into four quadrants labeled as follows:

  • Dominant: large market share and large profit share
  • Star: low market share with large profit share
  • Fading: high market share with low profit
  • Marginal: low market share and low profit

Through a series of four diagrams, he takes the reader step by step to the eight vectors at right.

It's a lovely piece of work and quite easy to follow. You can see it here.

See also:

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

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About This Author
Philip Elmer-Dewitt
Philip Elmer-Dewitt
Editor, Apple 2.0, Fortune

Philip Elmer-DeWitt has been covering Apple since 1982, first for Time Magazine, and now on the Web for Fortune.com.

Email | @philiped | RSS
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