THE INFORMER


Early indicators


Want to place some bets on the performance of big names in 2012?


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. Such is the regularity with which the


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iPhone vendor hoovers up mind-boggling sums of the folding stuff that the Informer has commissioned a new key for his office computer that says Applepostsrecordprofits, which will save him from having to type it out word by word every three months. In the last 92 days of calendar 2011, Apple


grossed $46.33bn, which is more or less equivalent to the GDP of Slovenia for 2010. Net profit for the quarter was $13.06bn, which exceeded by some distance the total revenue Google managed to gather for the same period, which was a dash over $10bn. How long can this tremendous growth


continue? Revenue was up 75 per cent year on year, while profit more than doubled. With 37 million iPhones sold, shipments were up 128 per cent year on year. And there was a 111 per cent upturn in iPad orders, with 15 million units shipped. The popularity of this increasingly mass market duo is filtering back to Apple’s desktop business as well. The firm’s PCs retail at a substantial premium to most Windows-based machines, but sales were nonetheless up 26 per cent at 5.2 million units. With the iPhone 5 certain to roll out


later this year, and a TV play also widely anticipated, you can expect the big numbers to keep on coming. How others must envy such a performance.


Nokia, still the handset market leader, leaked €954m for the final quarter of 2011, compared to an operating profit of €884m for the same period in 2010, and a €71m loss for Q3 last year. CEO Stephen Elop made a valiant effort to accentuate some positives, trumpeting sales of more than one million Lumia smartphones; Nokia’s new flagship handsets based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform. But the firm’s struggles in the lower


end of the market—which has sustained its leadership during wilderness years in the


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t the back end of January, as usual, the great and the good of the industry played show and tell with their bank


high end—show no signs of letting up. The long, drawn out demise of Symbian continues, with Elop confirming that the platform is losing out to low-priced smartphones. Nokia is revising its forecasts for Symbian-based unit sales downwards. Exactly how far, Elop didn’t say. Nokia really has its work cut out. The


Informer has had a good play with the Lumia800 and it’s a great device (the pre-commercial model that he has is a bit temperamental) but will it really spearhead a turn-around? The Finnish vendor also announced that it had flogged its 1.5 billionth S40 device, one of its new Asha feature phones. These will prove just as important as the high end product for Nokia in 2012. Elsewhere in the device vendor community,


Samsung netted $3.5bn for the final quarter, contributing to annual profit of $12.2bn. This was down 15 per cent year on year, and the Korean player’s endless legal spats with Apple are probably taking their toll. Motorola Mobility, meanwhile, lost $80m for the quarter, which was the amount it made in profit for the same period in 2010. Again legal fees played their part, with Moto also citing tougher competition. Japanese vendor NEC was also feeling the


pain, announcing late this week that it is to cut 10,000 jobs at home and abroad, on an expected annual loss of $1.3bn. Sales are down across both networks and devices, and flooding in Thailand last year hit a number of the firm’s factories, NEC said. In operator land AT&T topped the losses


table, spurting a monumental $6.7bn into the ether during the final quarter of last year. Revenues were up at $32.5bn and with 9.4 million smartphones sold, the firm had its best every quarter in retail terms. But its planned takeover of competitor T-Mobile, which was blown out of the water by US antitrust authorities, is now coming back to haunt AT&T, which for some reason that the Informer will probably never understand, agreed to pay T-Mobile $4bn if the deal didn’t go through. There’s money to be made in these abortive


marriages! n Mobile Communications International | First for news, best for business


Join the debate A round-up of recent reader comments from the industry leading website Telecoms.com. Get involved in the discussion at www.telecoms.com/join-the-debate/


Leaving customers satisfied requires more than simply increasing bandwidth. The traditional approach of over-sizing the network infrastructure is counter- productive, as it will defeat the purpose of Ethernet as a cost-effective technology. Nevertheless, while right-sizing is critical to staying aligned with the objective of cost containment, quality of experience (QoE) requires also must be balanced in parallel. Customers who signed up for expensive data service packages, especially those with international usage, expect high QoE. When they don’t get it, they are much more likely to churn.


Marc Lippe on backhaul challenges for LTE


Introducing another operating system could be a recipe for disaster. Regardless, it will be interesting to see if Samsung move away from Google’s Android platform during 2012. Time will tell!


Beacon on Samsung’s plans to merge Bada with Tizen


Right now, mobile users number 350 million. What happens when 800 million users engage in Facebook mobile? It puts the data spectrum crunch in perspective, and sheds some light on Google+ user- focused search responses…


Bill Gwinn at Accenture on Facebook on thae mobile


Cellcos are in a tight spot, it must be admitted: users want to do what handsets enable them to do, and that means great strain on mobile data networks. That calls for more investment, and margins are getting tighter. Not to mention the PR nightmare every time an operator wants to cap something or make a few quick quid on the side, to put it that way. Where and how this will end, hard to say.


Eustace Breeze on GiffGaff’s decision to kick out heavy users


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