The combined entity will have 17 per cent of the analogue semiconductor market

Silicon vendor Texas Instruments (TI) has announced that it is to acquire fellow semiconductor player National Semiconductor in an all-cash deal that values National at $6.5bn. TI said the deal had the unanimous approval of the boards of both companies and is expected to close in the final quarter of the year.

TI said it was attracted by National’s portfolio of 12,000 analog semiconductor products, the strength of its business in the industrial power market and the quality of its customer design tools. Upon conclusion of the deal, sales of analogue semiconductors will account for almost half of TI’s revenue.

“This acquisition is about strength and growth,” said Rich Templeton, chairman of TI.  ”National has an excellent development team, and its products combined with our own can offer customers an analogue portfolio of unmatched depth and breadth. Our ability to accelerate National’s growth with our much larger sales force is the foundation of our belief that we can produce strong returns on our investment.”

The firm said that the analogue semiconductor market was worth $42bn in 2010, with its own share at $6bn, or 14, per cent, putting it in first place. National turned in revenues of $1.6bn for 2010, equivalent to three per cent of the market.

LG has announced plans to develop its own smartphone processors

Embattled South Korean OEM LG has announced that it’s working on developing its own smartphone chips in a bid to boost its flagging handset business. Although LG is the world’s third-largest mobile phone manufacturer, the company has reported losses for three quarters in a row and is under increasing pressure from rivals HTC and Samsung.

By making its own chips, LG would be joining a very small club in the mobile world: currently, only Apple and Samsung design and build their own chips for their devices. In doing so, they are able to save costs and reduce time to market with new handsets and devices – an advantage that LG is no doubt keen to gain over its rivals.

To date, LG has used chips from Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia in its smartphones. With plans for a new smartphone range that includes the Optimus 3D, an Android-based model capable of recording 3D images, the company is increasing its R&D staff complement by 15 per cent. In December last year, the company announced that it would spend 70 per cent of a planned $17bn investment strategy on new technology in a bid to regain lost ground. So far, LG has declined to go into detail regarding the proposed chips.

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All electronic devices bearing the ‘Qi’ symbol could be charged on any charging pad or surface marked with the same ‘Qi’ logo

Chip vendor Texas Instruments this week unveiled the industry’s first Qi-certified wireless power development kit, which enables engineers to integrate wireless power technology into consumer electronics.

The Qi standard has been developed by the Wireless Power Consortium, of which TI is a member. Under the Consortium’s plans, all electronic devices bearing the ‘Qi’ symbol could be charged on any charging pad or surface marked with the same ‘Qi’ logo. The global wireless power charging standard is targeted at low-power devices that are five watts and below, such as mobile phones and personal music players. However, the development kit released by TI this week could also see wireless power technology deployed in infrastructure applications such as furniture and cars.

TI’s bqTESLA development kit includes a single-channel transmitter, a direct-charge receiver and associated magnetic, no additional software development is required. The kit is on display to developers at the CES show in Las Vegas this week.

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Netbook vendors jump on Google Chrome OS

Google has already won support from a handful of key players in the netbook and mobile computing spaces for its newly announced operating system.

The web giant said that Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba had all signed up to get involved in the Chrome OS either on a hardware or software level.

Google announced plans to launch a full fledged operating system in 2010 earlier this week. Bringing its efforts in the web browser and small footprint operating system spaces together, the Chrome OS marks a further encroachment on Microsoft’s territory and reinforces speculation on the firm’s plans for world domination.

The company kick-started the Android project in November 2007, carving itself a niche in the mobile and portable devices space as well as set top boxes and other consumer electronics. Then in September 2008, the web giant launched the Chrome browser, which neatly integrates with Google’s online services and is targeted at online users.

Essentially, the platform will be Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. The OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips pitching it at the mobile and desktop markets, and for application developers, the web is the platform, using standard technologies that run on Chrome, Windows, MacOS and Linux.

As with Android, Google is tapping the open source community to drive Chrome forward. Later this year the firm will open source the code base, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

The Informer refers, of course, to the announcement this week that the European handset community is to standardise the jack on mobile phone chargers, ending the need for a new one to be issued with every handset. This is great news for the environment, because the need to manufacture more chargers will be negated, and packaging can be reduced. And it’s great news for customers, who won’t have to pay extra for the charger (and for that one guy in the office that comes by every now and again saying: “Has anyone got a Sendo charger?” to which somebody replies: “Of course not. You’re the only person in the southern half of this country who has a Sendo phone”).

It’s bad news for the companies that make chargers, however. The Informer was once told that the only reason charger jacks changed every few years, and were different for models from different vendors, was that the handset vendors were indulging their component suppliers, who would have made less money had a single standard been implemented. That little racket’s up now, though, as Apple, LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Research in Motion (RIM), Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Texas Instruments have all pledged to use Micro-USB in the future.

Actually it doesn’t apply to all phones; any that do not have USB-enabled data transfer are excluded from the Memorandum of Understanding because, says Brussels, once this programme gets up and running most phones will be USB-data enabled.

In reaching this decision – which should see the first compatible products hitting stores next year – the industry has avoided legislation being passed by the EC to force it to produce a common charger standard. So perhaps that was the motivator, rather than all the touchy-feely enviro-worthiness. It will be interesting to see if the chargers are rolled out globally.

While we’re on the subject of European Legislation, the latest of EC Commissioner Viviane Reding’s directives came into play this week, with roaming charges slashed. From now on, a text message sent from abroad in the EU will cost no more than €0.11 instead of €0.28 previously, and the wholesale price of data will be capped at €1 per MB, compared to an average wholesale price of €1.68 per MB. The wholesale cap will fall to €0.80 in 2010 and to €0.50 in 2011.

Consumers will also benefit from further cuts in the price of mobile phone calls while roaming in another EU country. A roamed call made in another EU country must not cost more than €0.43 per minute, and no more than €0.19 to receive. Outgoing roaming calls will also be charged by the second, after the first 30 seconds, rather than by the minute, and incoming calls will be charged by the second from the first second.

As a result of these adjustments, European consumers are expected to save up to 60 per cent on their bill for using a mobile phone abroad in the EU.

“The roaming rip-off is now coming to an end,” proclaimed a victorious-sounding Reding, before adding a further warning, something she seems incapable of resisting: “For now, EU rules are limited to reducing inter-operator charges. I call on the mobile industry to pass these savings on to data roaming customers swiftly. The Commission and national regulators will monitor data roaming charges very carefully and assess next year whether the roaming market is finally becoming competitive.”

Heading to the UK, it is now believed that Vodafone and Telefónica O2 have entered the scrap to bag German carrier T-Mobile’s British operation. Orange and 3UK were already reported to have shown interest.

Consolidation in the mature UK market has long been expected, and a goodwill writedown of €1.8bn for the carrier on the back of its Q1 results fuelled speculation that the firm is looking to offload its UK operation. However, the recent appointment of Richard Moat as the head of T-Mobile UK was taken by some to indicate parent firm Deutsche Telekom’s commitment to the business, at least in the medium term.

Vodafone, meanwhile, has also patched up its differences with reseller Carphone Warehouse, meaning Vodafone product will soon once again be available through that high street retailer.

Still in the UK, O2 announced this week that it had sold out of its first allocation of Apple’s iPhone3GS. As if the carrier needed any more reasons to regret not offering any Android product, or the N97; now, temporarily at least, it’s got no headline grabbing handset. That could be about to change, though, as reports this week have sprung up in the mainstream press reporting what we suggested a few weeks ago – namely that O2 is going to offer Palm’s Pre.

At the other end of the handset market, it’s probably safe to say, resides the Orange BIC phone. Branded by the ballpoint and disposable razor firm, it’s no surprise that this unit is not function-rich. Orange has been selling this handset in France for the past year and is now about to take it to Spain, where the low-end prepay unit will sell for €29 with 20 minutes of airtime.

Canadian vendor Nortel’s 4G IPR is worth a little more than this, apparently, although not quite as much as the company had hoped. JP Morgan had been cited as valuing the intellectual property at $2.9bn but ABI‘s chief research officer Stuart Carlaw reckoned this was a load of hooey. The $2.9bn figure was based on the assumption that Nortel’s IPR would garner a royalty rate of one per cent of every LTE device sold, he said. “This is disproportionate to their patent holdings and cannot be seen as fair and reasonable. I doubt any other single vendor will be looking for this type of return- even Qualcomm.” Like Nortel needs another kick in the swingers.

In our (very) occasional Romanian roundup, the news this week is that Greek carrier Cosmote is to acquire local carrier Telemobil, known to Romanian consumers as Zapp. Cosmote is buying the operator under a share purchase agreement worth €61m, with the Greek firm also assuming Zapp’s debt and other liabilities worth in the region on €146m.

Zapp holds a CDMA license in the 450MHz band and a 3G WCDMA license in the 2100MHz band. Its 3G network currently covers 23 Romanian cities and its total customer base exceeds 374,000 postpaid customers. The purchase is a touch of the old in-country consolidation, as Cosmote already operates Romania’s third largest cellco, with 6.6 million GSM customers (Q109), and the company is apparently looking to merge operations with its new acquisition.

A quick update on the rumour and speculation surrounding Zain’s African portfolio, which was further fuelled by the appointment of Swiss bank UBS this week to assess the company’s assets.

Zain acquired African player Celtel in 2005 for $3.36bn, and has continued to invest and acquire in the region ever since – most recently exploring opportunities in Morocco in March 2009. But while the carrier has never had any trouble raising money in the past, even the wealth of the Middle East is not immune to a global financial crisis and, more recently, the firm has been laying off staff, hatching outsourcing plans with kit vendors and launching various cost management initiatives. The figure being touted for the firm’s African portfolio is $12bn, and the buyer is thought to be French firm Vivendi.

Earlier today a Zain spokesman told the Informer that the company is “running a strategic review to enhance shareholder value,” and has an ongoing relationship with UBS. He also said that the firm: “Is continuously assessing the telecommunications landscape in the Middle East, Africa and Asia for value accretive acquisition opportunities.”

And that’s about the size of it, readers. It’s been a quiet week.

Take care

The Informer

Finally a common handset charger is on its way

A new handset industry initiative means that one of the biggest frustrations for mobile phone users – trying to find a compatible charger when not at home – will hopefully become a thing of the past.

This week, the world’s biggest handset vendors signed an agreement to introduce a common charger for mobile phones.

The first generation of inter-chargeable devices and chargers should reach the European market in 2010.

In a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) submitted to the European Commission, the mobile industry identified the Micro-USB connector as its common standard.

At present, there is a plethora of different chargers for different models of mobile phone, and the EC noted that almost every household has a collection of chargers that have become superfluous over time, generating several thousand tons of waste a year.

As a result, the Commission had requested industry to come forward with a voluntary commitment to solve this problem in order to avoid legislation. The companies that have signed the agreement are Apple, LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Research in Motion (RIM), Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Texas Instruments.

Vice president Gunter Verheugen, responsible for enterprise and industrial policy in the EC, said the agreement, “will make life much simpler for consumers. They will be able to charge mobile phones anywhere from the new common charger. This also means considerably less electronic waste because people will no longer have to throw away chargers when buying new phones… As a result, the Commission does not consider it necessary to introduce legislation.”

Late last year, the world’s biggest handset vendors combined to launch a common energy rating system for mobile phone chargers, cluing consumers into the best, and worst performing models.

The five star rating system was developed to reduce the environmental footprint of telecoms products. Many consumers are unaware that phone chargers continue to use electricity when disconnected from the phone but left plugged into the wall socket. Device vendors claim about two thirds of the energy used by mobile devices is wasted in this way.

So the new rating system indicates how much energy the charger uses when left plugged in after charging is completed, with five stars for the most efficient chargers down to zero stars for the ones consuming the most energy.

]]> http://www.telecoms.com/12443/what-took-so-long-common-handset-charger-on-its-way/feed/ 3 greenconnect featured http://www.telecoms.com/4728/wouldnt-it-be-nice/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wouldnt-it-be-nice http://www.telecoms.com/4728/wouldnt-it-be-nice/#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2009 12:04:46 +0000 The Informer http://blog.telecoms.com/2009/01/30/wouldnt-it-be-nice/
The Informer was delighted by news this morning that the credit crunch is drawing to a close and that a period of intense economic prosperity is set to begin very shortly and last for some 75 years. No, of course it’s not true, but if you’re anything like the Informer, you’re already heartily sick of reading about the downturn.

Just yesterday a memo went round Informer towers detailing the new rules for overseas travel and expenses, for example. Apparently we’ve got to drink house champagne from now on; the Krug Clos d’Ambonnay’s off the menu. Our nightly hotel suite allowance is down to £5,000, which is an absolute shocker for anyone travelling to the US, given that the dollar’s upped its game. Worst of all they’ve grounded the company air fleet. We’ve got to start using scheduled flights.

So the Informer feels the pain of his industry brethren. Like the brass at Sprint Nextel who this week announced 8,000 job cuts, which is 14 per cent of the company workforce. Or Texas Instruments, which has saddled up 3,400 horses, put a member of its staff on each of them and slapped their well muscled hind quarters (the horses, not the staff) yelling: “Ya! Ya! Go on, now, git!”, while discharging their Peacemakers into the air.

TI has been hit by the global slowdown in handset sales and saw Q408 revenues drop 30 per cent to $2.5bn. Strategy Analytics was the latest number monger to confirm last year’s Q4 slowdown in the handset industry, this week reporting that handset shipments for Q408 fell ten per cent year on year to 295 million.

Sprint, meanwhile, is losing around one million subscribers every quarter and seeing its annual revenue dropping at double-digit rates. The firm has a poor rep in terms of customer service and network performance, which is perhaps why Kathy Walker, Sprint’s chief information and network officer, is one of the 8,000 forced to ride off into the sunset.

Sprint’s competitor AT&T tried to sugar its Q4 pill by reporting a 7.7 per cent increase in net profit for 2008 as a whole. It still had to concede that the last three months were proper stinkers, though, with profits dropping year on year to $2.4bn. Revenues for both the fourth quarter and full year were up, however, by 2.4 per cent and 4.3 per cent respectively, topping $124bn at the end of 2008.

During the fourth quarter AT&T added 2.1 million net wireless subscribers, bringing its total user base to 77 million. The company counted 1.9 million Apple iPhone activations, of which approximately 40 per cent were customers new to AT&T. The company said its iPhone users continue to deliver high-value revenues with ARPU approximately 1.6 times higher and churn rates significantly lower than the company’s overall postpaid subscriber base.

This last fact is not surprising, given that, if you want to buy an iPhone from AT&T, you have to sign your life away like Robert Johnson. Nobody on AT&T’s iPhone package will have been able to churn yet. It’s a bit like saying that gorillas are happy in captivity because they haven’t written to their local government representatives to complain about it.

Even Qualcomm - ordinarily a money factory – has been hit. The firm said Wednesday that net income for the three months to the end of December fell 56 per cent year on year and 61 per cent sequentially to $341m as mobile phone shipments plummeted. “While we continue to estimate healthy growth in the CDMA-device market, we have lowered our shipment estimate for calendar year 2009,” said Paul Jacobs, CEO.

Rival US manufacturer, STMicroelectronics fared little better. The company reported a quarterly net loss of $366m compared to a profit of $20m in the same period last year, while net sales fell to $2.26bn from $2.7bn a year ago.

T-Mobile, meanwhile, is suffering deprivation of a different kind. Like so many rhinoceros hunted for the aphrodisiac trade, the German carrier has lost its Horn. Joachim Horn, that is, the firm’s CTO for the last five years, who is to make like a banana and split, in order to pursue a new professional opportunity outside Germany. We’ll let you know when Horn pops up again – and where.

It’s not all about loss and departure though, and this week the hotbed of activity is the Middle East. Young buck Zain remains on the prowl, and is today believed to be close to sealing a deal that will see it take a stake of unspecified size in Palestinian carrier PalTel, which operates in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Given the conflict in that troubled territory at the moment, this is not a move for the faint hearted – nor those without robust insurance, bearing in mind the level of damage being sustained by the country’s infrastructure.

And Vodafone’s Mid Eastern march began, with the World’s Largest Carrier by Revenues striking a partnership deal with UAE operator du. Under the deal, the lower case carrier will gain access to Vodafone’s products, services and exclusive devices, while Vodafone gets to daub the UAE liberally with its familiar branding.

At home, Vodafone might have trouble with its brand in Birmingham, a place that residents like to describe as “Englands second city”. The Midlanders, ysee, have decided to ban apostrophes on the citys street signs, and its surely only a matter of time before theyll do away with them altogether. The authorities reckon theres no point bothering with grammar, thisll leave Vodafones logo somewhat lacking. Lord knows what Lynne Trussll make of these developments. Sometimes, in this country, Birminghams populace are made out to be figures of fun. The Informer has no idea why.

Staying in the UK, we could have a comeback on our hands that would put Gary Barlow and the boys in the shade, as incumbent telco BT is believed to be planning a return to the mobile space. According to industry watchers, the carrier has been in discussion with 3UK and T-Mobile UK, which operate a 3G access network in the UK under a joint partnership.It is thought that BT will strike a deal to offer 3G services, maybe mobile broadband, over this jointly-owned network.

The carrier offloaded its own mobile network, Cellnet (now known as O2), back in 2001, but has made its wireless designs known in recent years. In 2005, BT introduced Fusion, an FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence) service under an MVNO partnership with Vodafone, but the offering has proven disappointing.

“Where there is smoke there is fire,” said Michael Kovacocy, European telecoms analyst and sector strategist at Daiwa Securities. “We are already expecting an aggressive entry by BT into the consumer mobile broadband market shortly. Getting serious about mobile – at a time when mobile operators look increasingly likely to open up their networks in order to drive incremental revenue in a mature market, future-proof against adverse regulatory trends and perhaps most importantly of all strip costs out of their core network and delivery system by integration of fixed and mobile assets – looks like a good move by BT,” he said.

One comeback that is looking more questionable is that of Canadian vendor Nortel. And following developments this week, we can be sure, at least, that it won’t be attempting any kind of WiMAX revival. This morning, Nortel announced that it was getting out of WiMAX altogether, providing more bad publicity for a fledgling technology that is sometimes positioned by its proponents as a viable contender to LTE.

“We are taking rapid action to narrow our strategic focus to areas where we can drive maximum return on investment,” Richard Lowe, president of Nortel’s carrier networks business, said in a statement. Nortel’s already dumped its metro Ethernet business and its WCDMA unit, so at least it’s achieving its narrowing goals. What its focus will be if it survives remains to be seen. And, as a colleague of the Informer’s pointed out this morning, when the firm’s IT guys get round to updating the website, it’s going to have a very clean feel to it.

The announcement is not good new for Alvarion, an Israel-headquartered supplier of WiMAX RAN kit, which entered into a partnership with Nortel in June 2008. Under the terms of the arrangement, Nortel was to channel R&D funding (the amount of which was not disclosed) to Alvarion in order to accelerate WiMAX base station development and increase economies of scale. Nortel was still able to resell Alvarion base stations under the terms of the partnership, but Alvarion was also able to offer customers an end-to-end WiMAX solution using Nortel ASN gateways and CSN (connectivity service network) systems.

With the closure of the Nortel partnership, Alvarion’s ability to penetrate the North American market is weakened. Nortel says it will work closely with Alvarion, however, to transition its mobile WiMAX customers to help ensure that ongoing support commitments are met without interruption. Whether that makes Alvarion feel any better is not clear.

You have to choose your friends carefully, don’t you.

Take care

The Informer

US chip shop Texas Instruments is looking to cut its cellular baseband operations, by flogging off its merchant market business, the company revealed this week.

TI reported a 26 per cent drop in third quarter income, from $758m last year to $563m this year, while revenues dived 8 per cent year on year to $3.4bn.

To cut costs in the near term, reductions in the company’s cellular baseband operations will begin immediately and are expected to be complete by June 2009. TI anticipates annual savings of more than $200m once these reductions are complete, although the firm expects to take restructuring charges of approximately $110m across the next three quarters.

The vendor is also looking to offload its baseband business completely as it switches its focus to application processors.

But as Nomura’s Richard Windsor points out, the company is taking a big gamble with this move.

The baseband chip deals with radio communications, while the application processor runs higher level software such as music players and cameras. TI’s latest strategy banks on the fact that the applications processor and the baseband will remain isolated components, despite a clear industry trend to the contrary.

Windsor believes that the direction of the market is in fact the opposite, “Meaning that once a technology is stable it will be integrated into the baseband.” Indeed, we’ve heard plenty of noise about system on a chip (SoC) implementations and multi-core processors, which might integrate GPS, audio and video processing and Bluetooth with the baseband.

It’s also not without irony that Windsor notes that the best performing 3G chipset going into almost all of the non-Nokia high end handsets is Qualcomm’s 72** series fully integrated dual core solution. “We believe that greater integration is in the interest of the handset customer as fewer chips mean smaller phones, simpler designs and lower power consumption,” Windsor said.

It should also be noted that TI has actually spent a lot of time and money developing its OMAP Vox range of products which integrate the baseband and applications processor on the same piece of silicon.

As a result of this latest move, TI stands to lose WCDMA market share to Qualcomm, Nomura predicts, suggesting that the real reason Texas is bailing out of the baseband market is an “Inability to create a working merchant market 3G baseband.”

Moto had been planning to unveil its new range of devices on October 3 at an event in London but something seems to have cropped up and the event has been delayed indefinitely.

The company isn’t saying what’s up but it could be that the chips are down. Earlier this month, Motorola removed US chip vendor Qualcomm from its 3G suppliers list.

In the short term, Moto is believed to be shifting its business to its own chipset spin off, Freescale Semiconductor, but in the long run, it looks like Texas Instruments is set up to get the contract.

Reports suggest that Motorola has already begun to shift resources away from Qualcomm, with handsets designers actively encouraged to shunt Qualcomm kit out of new products. So it might be that the transition period is posing some supply problems.

Moto is in a bit of a pickle at the moment after reporting that net loss for the second quarter plummeted to $28m, down from a profit of $1.4bn in the same period last year. Revenues also dropped from $10.8bn a year ago to $8.7bn, as the company’s mobile handsets unit continued its downward trajectory.

Motorola shipped just 35.5 million units during the second quarter, down from 51.9 million in the same period last year. But perhaps the most telling evidence of weaknesses in the company’s product line comes from the fact that the vendor is still going on about the RAZR. And of concern to some industry watchers is the fact that the only device that Moto has pitched as successor to the RAZR is the unimaginatively titled RAZR 2, which started shipping in the second quarter.

Nokia, Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson, Micron Technology, Spansion, STMicroelectronics, and Texas Instruments are among the backers of the standard.

The new specification, dubbed Universal Flash Storage (UFS), is designed to remove the need for adaptors to accommodate different removable memory card sizes.

Sony Ericsson’s presence in this group is quite interesting to see given that it has continually pushed its in house Memory Stick Duo card format, whereas other players like Nokia and Samsung have followed the microSD card route.

According to the marketing material, UFS will provide a revolutionary leap towards supporting very low access times, as well as enabling high speed access to large multimedia files, while reducing power consumption.

It looks like the forthcoming standard also has its sights set on consumer electronics in general, rather than just the mobile phone market. “UFS is planned to provide consumers in the future with the convenience of a unified removable memory card that can be shared among various mobile, portable and other CE devices without the need for any adaptors,” the organisation said.

The UFS standard is expected to be finalised in 2009.