I see why you're skeptical of Strategy Analytics estimates, but I don't really follow all of your reasoning. I don't see where you get you 350 million operating cost number from. And I don't understand why Nokia would have to post a loss, for Apple to have made 1.5 times the profit. If Apple made 1.5 times as much profit as Nokia, on handsets, then by definition Nokia still made a profit.

In any case, it seems believable to me that Nokia has a $10 profit margin on it's phones. They are mostly selling massive amounts of extremely cheap devices in countries were people have pretty low incomes (compared to the U.S. and Europe) and to lower income markets in the U.S. and Europe. Again, if you take into account that 10% of the income earners have 80% of the wealth and those people are mostly concentrated in the U.S. and Europe, then the profit margins on phones both in other parts of the world and in the lower income sectors of the U.S. and Europe would have to be orders of magnitude smaller.

It would be interesting to see Strategy Analytics calculations and what assumptions they really made to arrive at their conclusion. But I don't really buy that what they're doing is pure guess work, as you say. The reason companies like this put out estimates like this is for the industry, so other related business can make decisons based on what's going on in the market. A business like that, which has been around for decades, wouldn't continue to exist if they just made up their numbers. So I still think if there was something so grossly wrong with their numbers, they wouldn't have put them out there. What, after all, is their interest in artifically painting a rosey picture for Apple? They're an independent company. And I also think the news reporting agencies, like Reuters, who carried the story could have put two and two together and notice ridiculous errors (it's not like only us people in this forum can notice these things and figure them out). So I'm still willing to buy it and assume that if on the face of it, it's a little hard to add up the numbers, that's because we aren't privy to all the elements of how Strategy Analytics did their calculations.