Is Apple Letting Samsung Off EASY?

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is demanding up to $2.75 billion of damages from Samsung, but says the damage done by the latter’s infringement was far greater than that. More than a quarter of Samsung’s $30.4 billion in U.S. smartphone and tablet sales result from copying Apple’s iPhone and iPad or infringing on other patents, a damages expert for the Cupertino-based company said on Monday.

Don’t Miss: Is Apple SHARING With Microsoft?

Accountant Terry Musika, citing Samsung records and testifying as an Apple expert witness, estimated that, from mid-2010 to March 2012, roughly $8.16 billion in revenue, or 22.7 million of Samsung’s total unit sales, came from products that infringed Apple patents.

The damages Apple is demanding include profits lost to infringing Samsung gadgets, but is only a third of what Musika said Samsung’s patent infringement helped it gain in sales. Meanwhile, Samsung attorneys argue that Apple’s evidence is not sufficient to justify the $2.75 billion it is demanding.

Samsung typically does not reveal its sales in the United States, but those details were made public as a result of trial. The Korean company sold more than 87 million mobile devices from June 2012 through March 2012, and earned roughly a 35.5 percent gross profit margin on $30.4 billion in revenue.

Musika, a former KPMG and PriceWaterhouseCoopers accounting partner, said it took more than $1.75 million to employ a team of 20 programmers, accountants, statisticians, and economists to work out damages. “It’s not me sitting at a desk with a calculator,” Musika told the court. “There are literally hundreds of millions of calculations.

Still, Samsung argues that Apple, which was struggling to keep up with demand for the iPhone 4 from July to October of 2010, did not have the capacity to have delivered on those additional sales, the sales it supposedly lost to infringing Samsung products.

“Apple couldn’t service its own customers with the iPhone 4, but it could service customers it didn’t have?” Samsung attorney Bill Price asked Musika. Price also argued that damages should vary depending on whether the Samsung product in question infringed just one or all of Apple’s patents.

Don’t Miss: Google Has BIG PLANS For This NEW Buy.