HTC puts all its eggs in One basket
HTC, the bealguered Taiwanese phonemaker, expects sales to jump over 60 per cent between the first and second quarters. That’s quite an uplift, and certainly better than last quarter, when sales significantly missed expectations, driving down its first quarter profits to record lows.
What’s behind the change? Well, it helps to have a flagship phone to sell. Continue reading »
Apple: parts suppliers profit from alternative customers
Apple may be souring the market with its unimpressive forecasts, but not all the suppliers who rely on the US tech group for orders are suffering.
Shares in Largan Precision, a Taiwanese lens maker, gained 7 per cent on Friday after it reported stronger than anticipated earnings for the last quarter and, against expectations, forecast more growth ahead. Its secret? Growth of other brands has been strong enough to offset Apple. That’s a change from the days when Apple was component companies’ key driver of growth. Continue reading »
Apple in China: something positive
After the apologies, the mea culpas and the admissions of getting it wrong, Apple can claim to be doing something right at last in China – as far as the company’s latest results show.
The tech giant may have lost the confidence of some investors, with shares falling from the giddy heights of just over $700 to around $406 – a reduction in market cap of over $290bn. Commentators have asked questions of the product line, even the position of chief executive Tim Cook.
But Apple in China is doing very nicely, thank you. It’s the only region to register an increase in revenues from the last quarter. Continue reading »
India: home of the Braille smartphone
A quarter of the world’s 161m blind and severely visually impaired people live in India, according to Sightsavers, the international charity.
Combine that with the fact that India is buzzing with technology and entrepreneurship, and it makes sense that the world’s first Braille smartphone is being developed in the country. Continue reading »
ZTE: a fight to spin off the handsets
ZTE marked its 15th anniversary in the handset market on Thursday, but the man heading up that section of the business was not in a celebratory mood.
China’s second-largest telecom equipment maker should consider spinning off its devices arm lest it become a casualty of the state-controlled group’s staid ways and financial struggles, according to He Shiyou, head of the company’s handset unit (pictured). Continue reading »
HTC under pressure from sales plunge
Taiwan smartphone maker HTC has, again, reported a sharp drop in monthly sales.
The year on year fall of 44 per cent in its February sales is unsurprising — executives last month warned revenues would slip this quarter — but the trouble at HTC is also part of a broader upheaval in the mobile market as even market leader Apple and its rivals now grapple with how to deal with what consumers want, and how much they’re willing to pay. Continue reading »
América Móvil teams up with China-US security software maker
Source: NQ Mobile
A US Congressional committee might have branded Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corporation, the Chinese telecom equipment makers, as a threat to US national security.
But such fears do not appear to be shared by Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man. On Monday, Slim’s América Móvil, which dominates the mobile phone business in Latin America, announced plans to team up with security software maker NQ Mobile, a Cayman Islands-registered company with Chinese roots. Continue reading »
Apple in India: expensive, but growing
India may be the world’s second largest mobile phone market by users but so far it hasn’t been a major focus for Apple. In the absence of the iPhone, Samsung and BlackBerry have led the way in the country.
More recently, however, that has begun to change. Just as BlackBerry launches its first smartphone in India under the BlackBerry 10 operating system, Apple is joining the fray with a big push in the developing market. Continue reading »
NQ Mobile: safeguarding smartphones
In 2005 Henry Lin, a young professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, was working with a scientist from mobile maker Nokia when they discovered something unusual. It was malware, on the Symbian platform that powered most of Nokia’s smartphones at the time; the first known instance of malicious software appearing on a smartphone. And to Lin, it was an opportunity.
Lin, his colleague Vincent Shi and five graduate students cobbled together $15,000 from their families and set up NQ Mobile on the premise that mobile phone security was going to become every bit as important as personal computer security. Eight years on, the company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and has 242m users in 150 countries. Continue reading »
China: selling smartphones to the cool …and the uncool
Just like Christmas in the West, Lunar New Year is a big shopping feast in China. In the race for consumers’ attention, 360buy, the country’s biggest online retailer, has come up with a marketing coup that targets the affluent and the cost-conscious at the same time.
In a special smartphone sales campaign headlined “a thousand reasons to buy a new phone”, the website uses a collage of different consumer products to describe one day in the lives of two very different characters – the man-about-town and the loser. Continue reading »
For technology companies, Africa looks a lot like the final frontier. Mobile operators, search providers and phone manufacturers have all been racing to secure their share of the continent’s famously fast growing market as new undersea data cables and soaring mobile phone subscriptions reshape the continent’s connectivity.
Microsoft might have been operating on the continent for two decades, but it is no different. The world’s largest software maker is launching a comprehensive new strategy to expand internet access in Africa, positioning it to grow its business on the continent. Continue reading »
HTC: the future is emerging markets… and cheaper phones
HTC, once the new phone darling on the mobile scene, is struggling. The company’s Q4 2012 results weren’t pretty, the stock has dropped 48 per cent in the last 12 months, and it is losing ground to Apple and Samsung. Shares were down on Monday by 1.55 per cent.
So what to do? Focus on emerging markets, of course… Continue reading »
BlackBerry 10: the Kerala connection
Imagine an app that talks you through your yoga routine. Or an app that allows you to unlock your car, start the engine and turn on the air-conditioning remotely.
These are just two ideas developed by young south Indian entrepreneurs for the new BlackBerry 10, which launches this week. Continue reading »
What does Lenovo want to be?
Pioneer computer maker Apple is now most famous for phones and tablets. We may say the same of Lenovo one day, but not yet.
Lenovo may have made in-roads in the mobile phone market, but it is also vying with HP to be the world’s biggest PC maker. The company posted a record quarterly profit, up by a third from a year earlier. Can it really do both? What does it want to be? Continue reading »
Samsung & Apple’s shared misery: numbers up, stocks down
Relations between Samsung and Apple reached a low point last year as they squared off in intellectual property disputes on four continents.
But this week gave the rivals something to bond over: each company reported strong growth in smartphone sales, only to watch investors rush for the exit. Continue reading »
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