“The decrease in _____ revenue was primarily due to _____” and “uncertainty associated with the proposed acquisition by Oracle and increased competition.” That refrain is repeated over and over again in Sun’s latest grim earnings report, which was filed without much in the way of announcement Friday afternoon.
Here’s an interesting data point from Apple’s recent 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission: The company has budgeted $1.9 billion in capital expenditures for fiscal 2010. That’s 70 percent more than the $1.1 billion it spent in 2009. What does Apple plan to do with those additional funds?
2009 semiconductor sales are down from 2008 by nearly record amounts, but they’re improving. That’s the latest word from the Semiconductor Industry Association, which said today that global chip sales rose in September from the previous month–the seventh straight month of gains.
“We always said 2009 would be a tough year.” SAP CEO Léo Apotheker made that remark during the company’s third-quarter earnings call today and, sadly, SAP’s worse-than-expected performance and reduced forecast for the year would seem to bear him out.
IBM continues to be one of the econalypse’s success stories. This afternoon, the company beat analyst expectations, posting a third-quarter profit of $3.2 billion, or $2.40 a share, on revenue of $23.6 billion. Net income was $3.2 billion, up 14 percent from year-ago earnings of $2.8 billion.
Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo says the demand for mobile devices improved in many markets during the third quarter–but you wouldn’t know it to look at the company’s earnings. This morning, Nokia posted an unexpected 559 million euro ($836 million) loss for the period, its first in a decade. Worse, its smart-phone market share declined to 35 percent from 41 percent in the previous quarter.
Perhaps Palm really does have the “special sauce” needed to attain smart phone leadership, as RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky recently claimed. Reporting first-quarter results this afternoon, the company posted a narrower-than-expected loss, said it shipped 823,000 smart phones during the quarter and announced plans for a common stock offering of 16 million shares.
Reporting second-quarter results earlier this year, Microsoft cited “a continued shift to lower-priced netbooks” as one factor degrading its financial performance. The netbook’s ascension meant, and continues to mean, that Windows client-licensing revenue is down. So the company will surely be aghast to learn that netbook sales are growing twice as quickly as those of full-sized laptops.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is taking a $999,999 pay cut. According to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ellison will receive a base salary of $1 for fiscal 2010, down from the $1 million he collected in fiscal 2009.
Now that Palm has finally realized there’s no longevity in forever shipping incremental improvements to the PalmPilot, the company has quite a future ahead of it. Never mind that it faces some particularly long, historic odds. Because according to RBC analyst Mike Abramsky, Palm has the “special sauce”–the means of orchestrating a second act, perhaps even one of Jobsian proportions.
The U.S. government broadband stimulus program couldn’t have come along at a better time. Leichtman Research Group said Monday that the country’s 19 largest cable and telephone providers added a net 634,000 broadband subscribers during the second quarter of 2009. That’s 29 percent fewer than were added in the same period a year ago and the lowest number of net additions of any quarter in the last eight years.
With the iPhone, Apple is doing to the handset industry what it has done to the PC industry with the Mac: Claiming an inordinate share of profits relative to revenue. Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi estimates that Apple, though it is only the fifth-largest handset vendor, claimed nearly a third of handset industry profits in the first half of 2009.
Good thing Palm withdrew investor Roger McNamee’s your-next-iPhone-will-be-a-Pre claim because there obviously wasn’t much truth to it. If there was, well, there would have been a massive rush on Pres nationwide this past month. And that clearly didn’t happen.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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