Friday, October 16, 2009
Nokia Reorg Actually “Job Rotation”
Nokia describes the management overhaul it’s undertaking as a common “job rotation,” but coming as it does after its lousy third-quarter financial performance and a worrisome decline in smartphone market share, it seems perhaps just a little bit more. This morning the Finnish mobile phone giant tapped Rick Simonson, currently its chief financial officer, as head of its handset division. And the company named Timo Ihamuotila, currently global head of sales, CFO.
With a combined share of over 20 percent of the Japanese handset market, a joint cellphone venture between NEC, Hitachi and Casio might be a wise move for the companies, which are struggling in an increasingly saturated domestic market. So reports that the three have decided to consolidate their mobile-phone operations aren’t wide of the mark at all.
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.
Apple put some of the vast $28 billion in cash and short-term investments it has socked away to good use this week by raising its stake in Imagination Technologies. The $5.16 million investment nearly triples Apple’s original 3.6 percent stake, giving it 9.5 percent ownership of the British chip designer whose PowerVR graphics technology figures prominently in the iPhone and iPod touch.
Between 2006 and 2011, IBM expects the number of mobile phone users to increase by 191 percent to approximately one billion. Little wonder then that the company is dedicating more resources to mobile services-related R&D. 
If the Federal Trade Commission takes issue with Google and Apple’s interlocking boards, Google will be well prepared. Last October, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati–the company’s outside law firm–gave a presentation on this very issue. Ironic, yeah? Click through to read the document in its entirety.
Tough break for Google. An Illinois software developer has sued the company, along with some four dozen others, alleging that they infringed on his trademark on the word “android.” Seems Erich Specht, who runs Android Data Corporation, holds the mark on the term “Android Data.” 
The econalypse is playing hell with the mobile phone market. Handset vendors world-wide shipped 244.8 million units in the first quarter of 2009, 15.8 percent fewer than the 290.8 million units shipped during the same quarter in 2008. 
Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, will soon be just a tad smaller. This morning the company said it will sack a further 450 employees in its mobile services business, a division charged with developing and delivering the Ovi-branded Internet services tied to Nokia devices. Seems the still souring economy has undermined Nokia’s ambitions in that area, and Apple’s success with the iPhone App Store has inspired it to look to third-party developers to bring new applications to its devices. 
Describing its long-term financial outlook to analysts last week, eBay said it expects Skype to more than double its revenue to over $1 billion by 2011. Quite a claim to make about an Internet telephony business for which the company has taken some pretty nasty write-downs, a business that back in January eBay seemed to be looking to divest. But apparently, eBay sees quite a bit of promise in Skype’s new voice-over-IP service for businesses. 
Not two months into 2009 and already the year is turning out to be the weakest the industry has seen in some time. With the economic downturn slowing growth in developing markets, consumers delaying cellphone purchases and retailers destocking them, cellphone juggernaut Nokia is scaling back production at its key Salo plant in Finland. 
