[icedchai]

Consumer electronics is a low margin business. Since low to mid single digit margin is typical and not every brand can be premium, like Apple, I'd say Sony and Samsung do pretty well, all things considered. "Success" is relative to the industry average.

[raw_anon_1111]

Samsung both sells premium hardware and manufactures a lot of it own components in house and sales components to other manufacturers including Apple. I consider Samsung “successful”.

Every single low margin PC company that exists now like Dell, HP etc were much more profitable than an almost bankrupt Apple in 1997. They had no vision and decided to compete on price. It doesn’t matter why they are barely profitable low margin businesses.

Seeing there revenue vs profits, they should take Michael Dell’s (bad) advice to Jobs when he came back - “shut the company down and give the money back to shareholders” who could make more money in treasury bonds.