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Sony spends $15 million on dealing with its cyberattack woes
Instead of announcing its financial results today, Sony had to merely issue a forecast for how it's fared in the last financial quarter. In case you've missed it, that's because it's dealing with the cyberattack that not only spilled the beans on much of Sony's movie business but also knocked out its accounting equipment. To that end, it's announced that it'll spend approximately $15 million this quarter to both investigate and recover from the cyberattack. (That's not to be confused with the $15 million in restitution it offered users last month for a separate security breach.) The company otherwise raised its earning forecast for the year, with net profits of $756 million made from October to December of last year. Sony isn't yet done restructuring, however. In its mobile business, it now plans to shed 2,100 jobs: a further 1,100 positions to cuts it previously announced last year.
Sprint cuts 2,000 jobs as its new CEO takes the reins
New CEOs frequently cut jobs to streamline their companies, and Sprint leader Marcelo Claure is proving to be no exception to the rule. The exec is cutting 2,000 jobs as part of "bold actions" he believes are needed to return the carrier to health. It's not hard to see why the layoffs are coming, unfortunately. Sprint is reporting an operating loss of $192 million during its fiscal second quarter (July through September), and it lost 272,000 of its bread-and-butter postpaid subscribers during the period -- not good when a rival like T-Mobile added 2.3 million.
LG sells a record-breaking 16.8 million smartphones, doubles profit in the process
As Samsung struggles and Apple starts to encroach on the Android mainstay of giant screens, LG's smartphones are doing alright. In fact they're doing pretty darn well. Announcing a record number of smartphones sold and the best quarter in five years, LG's sales totaled 16.8 million devices and the company announced an operating profit of $450 million, roughly double from the same period last year. Shipments of the mobile arm leapt 39 percent, although the good news was tempered (if only a little), by lower operating profits in the same quarter from its Home Appliance and a $2.44 million operating loss from its Air Conditioning arm, although LG reckons weather conditions were the cause for lower sales in its native Korea. TV and Home Entertainment profits increased five percent, with demand for LCD TVs increasing across the world. LG expects its high-end 4K displays will be responsible for some more impressive financial results later this year -- and probably hopes you're already saving up for the holiday season.
Mobile pushes Facebook to even greater heights, expect more stand-alone apps
...And Facebook's march towards utter market dominance continues unabated. While Twitter enjoys plenty of success, and we're sure someone out there still uses Google+, there's no denying that the king of the social networking hill is Facebook. And during the third quarter of 2014 the company did nothing but extend that lead. In particular the number of mobile users continued to explode at an impressive rate. The average number of monthly mobile users in September was 1.12 billion. (To put that in perspective: Twitter announced just 284 million monthly users across all platforms.) That's 29 percent more than last year. Most impressively many of those users check in every day. The average daily number of mobile users during the quarter was 703 million. And when you take the desktop into account, usage balloons to 864 million per day -- or about 64 percent of its users.
T-Mobile keeps outgrowing its rivals with 2.3 million new customers
T-Mobile has apparently decided that UnCarriers release their fiscal results at night, well after investors have gone home -- and to no one's surprise, there's plenty of good news that couldn't wait until the morning. The Magenta network is reporting that it added 2.3 million new customers in the third quarter of the year, 1.4 million of them postpaid (that is, regular subscribers). That's not the highest figure we've seen this year, but it's more than enough to outpace heavyweights AT&T (2 million wireless additions) and Verizon (1.53 million). Its average bill per person is up slightly year-over-year, too, so it's not simply bringing in the cost-conscious types.
AT&T's focus on connected cars is beginning to pay off
It's no secret that the US wireless market is saturated, and that most people who want a mobile device have already purchased one by now. Naturally, this means that the national players in the industry are looking for other points of revenue to aid future growth. AT&T is proving that it's one of the most successful in this venture by announcing today that it's activated a heap of connected devices last quarter -- to the tune of 1.3 million. That's a healthy number, especially since the company accumulated only a tenth of that in the previous quarter. This genre refers to a wide range of gadgets that come with an AT&T SIM card inside, but the most interesting part of this announcement is that over 500,000 of those activated devices come from connected cars.
Google puts ad revenue to good use with R&D growth
Google isn't a search company or a software developer. Its real business is advertising. Most of the money flowing into Mountain View (and there's quite a lot of it: $16.5 billion this quarter to be exact) comes from ads. The company could simply build up a war chest or snatch up some more startups, but clearly its eyes are on the future. With Larry Page at the helm Google has branched out beyond browsers and mobile operating systems to delivery drones, internet-delivering balloons and whatever Glass is. A year ago Page told investors he wanted to spend more on "speculative" research and development projects. At the time its R&D budget had just seen a $1 billion growth over the previous year. Since then Google has added nearly another $2 billion. Over the first nine months of 2014 has pumped $7 billion dollars into R&D projected, including $2.7 billion in the last quarter alone. Obviously, not all of that money is being funneled into Google X, but it's clear that the experimental arm is adding quite a bit to the company's expenditures. Loon and Calico aren't just about generating goodwill though. Clearly the more consumers Google can reach and the longer those consumers are alive, the more ads it can serve.
Netflix's growth slows down just as HBO joins the streaming fight
Netflix is no longer an up and comer, it's a giant, pushing out well-regarded original content -- in 4K even -- and constantly expanding its reach. Today we learned that HBO will finally hop off its cable-only throne and do battle with some sort of internet-only service next year, and as Netflix reveals how it did in the last three months, we'll find out how it plans to respond. According to CEO Reed Hastings' Q3 letter to investors, despite the "inevitable" move, he believes "it is likely we both prosper as consumers move to Internet TV." Meanwhile, his company has grown to 53 million customers worldwide and figures it will crack 57 million by the end of the year. The bad news? Those price hikes for new customers appear to have slowed growth, with Netflix adding 980,000 customers in the US, lower than both the 1.29 million net additions in the same period a year ago -- when it passed HBO in paid subscribers -- and the 1.33 million the company predicted just three months ago. There should be plenty to talk about when Netflix has its investor call at 6PM ET (live video streaming -- watch it embedded after the break).
Apple is now the fifth-largest PC maker in the world, if you ask IDC
Apple is historically a small player in the PC world compared to many of its peers, but it may have just entered the big leagues. IDC estimates that the company jumped to 6.3 percent market share in the third quarter of the year, making it the fifth-largest PC builder worldwide -- a feat it hasn't managed in decades. It's still no major threat to heavy-hitters such as Lenovo (20 percent), HP (18.8 percent) and Dell (13.3 percent), but IDC believes that a combination of slight price cuts and improved demand in "mature" markets like North America have helped it grow in a computer market that's still shrinking.
Samsung's Q3 profits drop 60 percent from last year to under $4 billion
At this time last year, Samsung was enjoying a record operating profit of $9.6 billion for its third quarter and shipping Galaxy phones seemingly as fast as it could make them. Now? The company announced its operating profit for the period will be down to between $3.6 and $4 billion, which would be its fourth straight quarter of declines. Of course, that's nothing to sneeze at but it represents a drop of 60 percent in just a year. We don't have specific sales stats, but industry analysts mentioned by the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg see its phone sales squeezed at the high-end by Apple's latest iPhones, and at the low end by numerous Chinese competitors like Xiaomi and Lenovo. Samsung's next steps -- after launching the new Galaxy Note 4 -- include growing its businesses making memory chips, processors and displays. Samsung announced today that it's building a new $14.7 billion chip plant in Korea -- maybe it can get prices of the next Galaxy Alpha down enough to get sales back on a growing track.
Sprint still struggling despite growing subscriber base and smartphone sales
Sprint has just revealed its Q4 2013 earnings, and despite increasing its postpaid subscriber base to a record 53.9 million, it still managed a net loss of $1 billion -- nearly four times worse than last quarter. That continues the US carrier's recent losing streak, and is especially notable during a holiday period when AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile all had gangbuster quarters. On the plus side, it managed to hit its LTE coverage goal of 200 million people, but that figure is still the lowest of all the major carriers. It also sold 5.6 million smartphones compared to 5 million last quarter, with 20.5 million sold for the year. That accounts for 95 percent of postpaid subscriber sales, which tops its main competitors. With few other financial bright spots, though, new owner Softbank might be wondering what it got itself into.
