Suppliers benefit as Apple products do brisk business

Suppliers basked in the reflection of Apple's glowing results yesterday after the company's gold standard iPhones and iPads flew off the shelves over the holiday sales season. Apple's forecast-beating fourth-quarter figures late on Tuesday helped it to beat Google's Android as the largest smartphone platform in the United States and to regain the world's largest smartphone-maker spot from Samsung. Apple's results were spearheaded by sales of the iPhone 4S, which is packed with technology from British chip designer Arm, said analyst Nick James at Numis. Performance Apple accounts for about 10 per cent of Arm's technology revenues, and for about 35 per cent of graphics and video chip designer Imagination's technology revenues, he said. "It means people are still driven by performance in terms of having the highest performance, highest functioning devices, and those tend to have quite a number of Arm-based chips in them." "It is one of the key things that drove Imagination to come through to the next level," James added. Shares in Arm jumped 4.2 per cent, while shares in Imagination were 4.1 per cent higher at 10.30 GMT. "[Apple] should help the whole sector today, but especially Dialog Semiconductor and other suppliers," said a Frankfurt-based trader. Shares in Dialog Semi were up 3.9 per cent. Faster rate Samsung became the world's largest smartphone-maker in the third quarter, but analysts said the 37 million iPhones sold in the fourth quarter should easily beat Samsung's expected sales of around 30 million. Samsung is due to report tomorrow. Research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech said Apple's share of the US market doubled from a year ago to 44.9 per cent in the October to December period, just beating the total for Android smartphones, which slipped to 44.8 per cent from 50 per cent. "Overall, Apple sales are now growing at a faster rate than Android across the nine countries we cover," said Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director at the research firm.