Being a public company would be so great if it weren’t for those pesky financial analysts. To break with the traditional love fest that typically follows an Apple quarterly financial report, the stock market threw a conniption fit that Apple ONLY improved profits by 21 per cent, year-on-year, and managed to grow revenues a “paltry” 22 per cent over last year at this time.
Apple once again posted huge financials, with the iPhone and iPad maker hitting quarterly revenue of $35bn and quarterly net profit of $8.8bn for the quarter ended June 30, an increase on the $28.6bn revenue and $7.3bn profit that it recorded in the same period last year.
Apple is reportedly impressed by the capabilities of the 802.11ac wifi protocol and the next generation of Apple devices are highly likely to support it, according to Perry Correll, director of product marketing at wifi technology firm Xirrus.
As the long-running patent war rages on between Apple and Samsung, a UK judge has ordered Apple to publish a notice on its website and in British newspapers stating that its Korean rival did not copy the iPad design for its tablets.
Google is set to be hit with a $22.5m fine for working around security settings in the Safari mobile browser to monitor iPad and iPhone users’ behaviour, according to various reports. The fine is to be issued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US, and would be the largest fine that the Commission has ever imposed on a firm.
If you watched Wimbledon’s epic showdown live on television, then you have Telstar to thank. Launched 50 years ago, the Telstar-1 satellite, brainchild of Bell Labs, made international live broadcasts possible. On July 10, 1962, the age of global communications truly began.
Canadian vendor RIM said it has now seen three billion apps downloaded for BlackBerry smartphones and the PlayBook tablet from its App World store, since it was launched in March 2009.
Consumers have shown that they are willing to pay a premium for a smartphone if the device is good enough. But they have not been enticed by low-cost smartphones, as it seems that many consumers in developed markets view their smartphone as both a crucial part of their lives and a status symbol. And at the end of the day, if they’re stuck with a phone for a 24-month contract, they want a good one.
Apple has unveiled a new operating system for mobile devices, iOS6, which sees the firm ending its reliance on Google’s mapping software. Instead Apple has created its own mapping application in a move to take more control of the assets on its devices. One analyst warned that this announcement could have a negative knock-on effect on the operator community.
Global sales of mobile phones declined on a qurterly basis for the first time in nearly three years, according to research firm Gartner this week. The two per cent year-on-year drop between the first quarters of 2012 and 2011 marks the first time the market has weakened since the second quarter of 2009.
The thought of Apple becoming an MVNO and offering its customers IP voice and messaging services as a cheap alternative to conventional voice and SMS is one that keeps many mobile operator CEOs awake at night. It is not just the loss of voice and SMS revenues that alarms operators. It is the risk that the operator would lose so much of its retail business. Network operators would become invisible to many of their (previous) customers.
Despite operator frustrations at the huge markups they have to pay on iPhone devices, Apple’s momentum has not been suppressed and it has once again posted sharp year-on-year increases in revenue and profit in its latest quarterly earnings.
The CEOs of Apple and Samsung, Tim Cook and Choi Gee-sung, have agreed to hold settlement talks to try to resolve a patent lawsuit over smartphone and tablet technology, according to a court filing. Meanwhile, Twitter has announced that it will begin a policy of not using patents as a tool to impede the innovation of others.
Nokia’s partnership with Microsoft has begun to bear fruit as sales of its devices running on the WP7 platform have outstripped Nokia’s Symbian handsets in Great Britain. The Lumia 800 handset accounted for 87 per cent of WP7 sales in the market, according to latest data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, while Germany remains the strongest market for WP7, with market share for the OS now up to 3.1 per cent.
Apple plans to initiate a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share and has already authorised a $10bn share repurchase programme.
Operators are looking for an alternative to Apple as the “leading brand in terms of entertainment today” and Sony “has the assets” to position it as such as the battle for consumer loyalty moves to the living room. That’s the view of Sony’s head of mobile in the UK and Ireland as the Japanese vendor makes a renewed assault on the mobile space – the first time Sony has been in the handset market as a solo brand for ten years.
It was all about the numbers this week as the great and the good of the industry played show and tell with their bank statements. There weren’t many in the market revelling in unreservedly good news on the financial front but, true to form, Apple had another bonanza to report.
Apple has surpassed Wall Street’s expectations after doubling sales its sales figures for iPhones, iPads and Macs for the first quarter of 2012. The company posted revenue of $46.33bn, with a net profit of $13.06bn for the quarter, which ended December 31, 2011. The net profit figure exceeded rival Google’s entire revenue for the same period, in which the search giant recorded sales of just over $10bn.
The latest patent battle between smartphone players has seen Apple lose an interim ruling in the US, after the firm attempted to sue Motorola Mobility for infringing three of its patents. It has also publicly identified nearly all of its suppliers and invited an outside workplace conditions group to inspect them.
The typical Apple iPhone 4S user is equivalent to two iPhone 4 users and three iPhone 3G users in terms of data demand, according to a report released Friday.
Consolidation, convergence and competitionCalls for consolidation in the European mobile market grow louder by the week and four-operator markets look increasingly challenged. Now, those mobile operators that have already built scale seem to be suggesting that there is no option but to expand yet further through diversification.
It is testament to Telstra’s aggressive approach to mobile broadband that an operator in a country of just over 23 million people should rank in the top ten operators worldwide in terms of LTE subscriber numbers. Mike Wright, Telstra’s executive director for networks and access technologies talks to Telecoms.com about the firm’s plans for further enhancing its LTE operation with fresh spectrum and LTE-Advanced capabilities.
Jonathan Bell, VP of Marketing at OpenCloud, discusses how policy and pricing are just two dimensions along which telecoms operators can differentiate their propositions. By adding a third dimension, the service behaviour itself, operators can define and bring true innovation to the market that surpasses the traditional approaches of the past, he says.
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With summer supposedly fast approaching, many look to trim some fat and get in shape for the sunny months. The Informer has never been a huge fan of gyms; in fact his favourite machine in the gym is the one that sells chocolate. Telefonica’s UK arm O2, is one business that is looking to get lean for the holidays, though, and this week it announced that it is to trim 3,500 UK employees.