Thursday, October 29, 2009
Motorola, Profit No Longer Mutually Exclusive
Motorola’s ambitious turnaround strategy is beginning to pay off. Posting earnings this morning, the company said it managed a surprise profit in the third quarter, despite a decline in revenue. For the period, the troubled handset maker reported a profit of $12 million, or a penny a share, compared with a year-earlier loss of $397 million, or 18 cents a share. Sales fell 28 percent to $5.45 billion from $7.48 billion. Not the prettiest of quarters, but that penny-a-share profit beat the consensus estimates of analysts, who had expected the company to simply break even.
Google is moving into your market. For tech companies, few words are more frightening, and yesterday we saw why. The mere announcement of Google Maps Navigation sent shares of established GPS device makers like Garmin and TomTom into an ugly downward spiral. 
Though Verizon’s new Droid ad campaign might seem to preclude one, Apple would be wise to ink an iPhone distribution deal with the carrier–if not to hasten iPhone adoption, then to slow rivals that would supplant it. That’s the argument put forth by Piper Jaffray analyst Chris Larsen in a research note to investors Monday.
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.
As the world’s largest maker of computer chips, Intel is considered a bellwether for the wider industry. So the fact that the company’s latest revenue and profit numbers handily beat expectations is a very good sign indeed.
Cisco CEO John Chambers wasn’t kidding when he said we’d see the company move into a number of new markets via acquisition over the next year. Earlier this year, Cisco acquired Pure Digital, developer of the Flip video camera, for $590 million. Two weeks ago it spent $3 billion on video-conferencing system maker Tandberg. And now it’s purchasing mobile infrastructure outfit Starent Networks for $2.9 billion, or $35 a share.
“Sales of iPhone through China Unicom, to state it mildly, have been disappointing. Volumes since launch have run at a fraction of stated goals.” So says Northeast Securities analyst Ashok Kumar, who, in a research note to investors this morning, warned that Chinese sales of the iconic handset are not nearly as good as expected. Which I suppose makes perfect sense because the iPhone hasn’t yet gone on sale in China.
Though he resigned earlier this year, former MySQL boss Mårten Mickos still has strong opinions about the open-source database outfit, which was acquired by Sun in 2008. In a letter to the European Commission Thursday, Mickos urged regulators to green-light Oracle’s takeover of Sun, arguing that to delay it will only harm competition. 
Customer satisfaction with the iPhone continues to run high–among both casual and business users. Apple’s smart phone scored highest in the both consumer and business categories of JD Power’s Smartphone Satisfaction Study, besting rivals like Research in Motion and LG.
Looks like Bing’s steady upward trend of market share gains may have reversed itself. Microsoft’s new search engine saw its U.S. search share fall in September, according to figures from Hitwise. Troubling news for Microsoft. Hitwise’s latest numbers are the second set of metrics from a Web analytics firm showing Bing’s market share in decline. 
If the teen demographic is a critical indicator of a company’s long-term growth prospects in the consumer electronics and online music markets, Apple has nothing to worry about. Because according to the results of Piper Jaffray’s 18th biannual Teen Survey, Apple devices continue to do well with American teenagers.
Add Morgan Stanley’s Kathryn Huberty to the list of analysts calling for Apple to broaden the iPhone’s distribution by ending carrier exclusivity deals. In a research note issued this morning, Huberty–noting that the iPhone’s market share grew 136 percent in France when Apple switched to multicarrier agreements there–said iPhone sales could more than double if the company took a similar tack in other countries.
