CNN was quoting @asymco today, with an editor’s touch: How Apple is sucking the profit out of the mobile phone market.

(The original asymco’s article is this: “The profit / phone x phones sold chart” and it is really worth reading.)

CNN editor’s point is Apple becoming more aggressive and more dangerous because its increasing profit / unit sales ratio: from 39% profit share from 3% sales share, to 55% from 5% and to 66.3% from 5.6% in Q2, “This can’t be much fun for anybody else trying to make money in this market“. Which is the dumbest thing said today.

Let’s see: Ferrari has a huge profit / sales rate; is this a threat to Toyota? To Renault? No, it’s even better for them to say “Look how expensive those cars are! We are making cars a hundred times cheaper and only fifty times lower in quality”.

Or, say, you don’t like the previous example for being too niched; say we’re talking about Toyota and Ford. Within the same product and price categories, if Toyota profit / sales ratio is too big, while its sales share is, say 5%, it only means Toyota is selling just a few cars, leaving 95% of the market in need. Which is, once again, quite OK for Ford.

The problem is not profit / sales rate, but the price / quality rate! Apple is sucking the quality out of the mobile market, and what’s even worse is the price positioning is the same as anybody’s else building premium mobile phones.

I don’t think CNN’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt got the idea: the total profit of a market cannot be (logically speaking) a finite amount, it is just a sum. Meaning, if I have 3 times more profit than you, it can be translated by me having 75% profit share, but it’s just incorrect to say that I somehow “gain” that share.

Nobody can stop a company making huge profit (share) but that company itself. And one tested method for that company to “not be able to increase its profit” is to start knocking off.

So, who’s sucking what, then?