Telecoms analyst site Asymco has a look at how much Samsung spends on marketing compared to other tech companies, particularly Apple, with Coca-Cola added as a sanity check from outside the bubble.
While the results are stunning with Samsung dwarfing the others, the Asymco story also touches on the total cost of sales and general administration expenses with the observation that, as a proportion of revenue, Sumsung’s are soaring while Apple’s are declining.
Teasing those figures out a bit more is interesting, when we track the sales and general administration costs of all the business we see that with the exception of Apple they’ve been remarkable flat in straight dollar terms over the last three years.
Of course this comparison is a little unfair as this is an absolute number, not as a proportion of revenue and as Horace Dediu points out in the Asymco posts Apple’s expenses as a ratio to sales has fallen.
For companies like HP, Dell and Microsoft where sales have been stagnant or falling it might be that the ratio is rising while spending is flat.
We’ll tease these figures out over the next few days.
In the meantime, the fact that Samsung is spending such an awesome amount on marketing should cause us to treat Android sales figures with caution as that spend in undoubtedly inflating their sales figures. More on that in the future as well.