What’s the most expensive smartphone component? Check your guess here
What’s in a smartphone? Most prominently a display and a case to hold it along with its internals, but interestingly that’s not its most expensive part. A modern smartphone consists of more than 25 components, coming from different manufacturers, at different prices, and all of this takes some high precision technology and a human hand to get crafted into a whole package.
And the most expensive part of that package is the... internal NAND flash memory. The technology allows keeping data without power, and on average 16GB of internal memory costs between $20 and $22. That’s more expensive than the massive screen on your phone which averages $18 to $20 in price.
Check out this piece of statistics will also reveal much about the profit phone makers make from devices with more memory. If we look at the standard $100 premium added for an additional 16GB of flash memory for the iPhone for example, and compare it with the average of $20 that Apple pays, we can definitely see where that huge profit margin comes from.
It’s all laid out in the infographic below, an infographic where finally there’s more info and less graphic.
source: Nomura Equity Research (PDF) via Bloomberg
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