In a recent article, Jan Dawson called the enterprise markets “The fastest-growing segment in mature smartphone markets”. Tim Cook had said in 2015 that enterprise markets had seen annual growth of 40% for Apple revenue, and this is indeed massive growth. The magnitude of the revenue was $25 billion annually, only 9% of total Apple revenues in the same period, but nonetheless huge. To put this into perspective, Dell’s peak revenue in 2012 was $62.1 billion annually.
The question is, if corporate adoption of mobile was driven by BYOD, wouldn’t Apple not see revenue growth? If all that was being done was adapting iPhones that the employees already owned to the corporate network, why would Apple see increased sales of iPhones to the enterprise?
My guess is that either of the following is happening in the marketplace;
- Despite continued popularity of BYOD, there is a significant portion of employees/employers who prefer to separate work and private devices. Hence purchases of company-owned devices.
- The popularity of BYOD itself may be on the decline, due to a shift towards corporate-owned-personally-enabled (CoPE) or choose-your-own-device (CYOD) scenarios.
Either way, it does not seem unreasonable to predict that within a few years time, Apple may be the largest IT hardware vendor to enterprise customers in the world.
Naofumi Kagami 