Apple Inc. is claiming that more than a quarter of Samsung Electronics' $30.4 billion US in smartphone and tablet sales in the United States result from copying of the iPhone and iPad or infringe on other patents, a damages expert for the U.S. company has told a court.
The Silicon Valley company is demanding up to $2.75 billion of damages from its Korean rival, which includes profits lost to infringing Samsung gadgets. However, Samsung lawyers argued that Apple's evidence was not sufficient to recoup such an award.
Samsung sold more than 87 million mobile devices from mid-2010 to March 2012, according to documents shown to the jury.
Accountant Terry Musika, citing Samsung records and testifying as an Apple expert witness, esti-mated that $8.16 billion in revenue, or 22.7 million of total unit sales over the two years, came from products that infringed Apple patents, such as the first Galaxy S smartphone in July 2010.
Samsung earned roughly a 35.5 per cent gross profit margin on that revenue, between June 2010 through March 2012, Musika said.
"It's not me sitting at a desk with a calculator," Musika, a former KPMG and PriceWaterhouseCoopers accounting partner, told the court. "There are literally hundreds of millions of calculations." He said it took more than $1.75 million to employ a team of 20 programmers, accountants, statisticians and economists to work out damages.
But Samsung argued 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.
"Apple couldn't service its own customers with the iPhone 4, but it could service customers it didn't have?" Samsung lawyer Bill Price asked Musika.
Price argued that the damages should vary depending on whether Samsung products at issue in the lawsuit infringed on just one or all of Apple's patents.
Apple is accusing Samsung of copying its iPhone and iPad. Samsung denies that and says Apple infringes several of its wireless technology patents.
