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Samsung's Q2 profit drops 26 percent due to sluggish TV sales, demand for phones explodes
You may or may not have noticed, but we're once again in the thick of earnings season, and today Samsung's in the hot seat. The company has reported that its second-quarter profit fell 26 percent year-over-year to 3.7 trillion won ($3.5 billion), largely thanks to underwhelming sales of flat screen TVs and, to a lesser extent, semiconductors. That's a shade worse than the whiz kids over on Wall Street were expecting, according to Bloomberg. In fact, the demand for televisions was so disappointing that it overshadowed what was actually an impressive quarter for the outfit's mobile division -- sales of feature and smartphones quadrupled year-over-year to 19.2 million units, putting the company on track to further narrow the gap with Nokia, the world's bestselling handset maker. All told, this balanced out to a modest growth in revenue -- an uptick of 2.9 percent to 39 trillion won ($36.7 billion).
Hotels are getting widescreens, but are they giving them high-def?
Hotels amenities are getting HOT. It is not good enough anymore to simply put a whirlpool tub in a hotel room and call it high-end. These days you need WIFI, touch screen phones, and flat panel HDTVs. But the issue is, are they giving these HDTVs high-def?We understand that hotels need to give their guests the best of the best these days, but a coupl of calls to high-end Detroit hotels, tells us that most of the hotels staff do not even know what high-def is. They were excited to tell us that they have flat screen TVs though in many of their suites, but the HDTV thingie just confused them more. Note to Rick Hilton: The four of us would be more then happy to be your executive staff on everything high-def and flat screen.
Been furniture shopping lately?
Plasmas are everywhere: restaurants, schools, diners, and furniture stores. Not real ones but rather those plastic look-alikes. I recently went shopping for some furniture for the theater I'm putting in my house (more on that to come later) and noticed that they were all over the place. This wasn't just at low end stores, but even Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel style stores. Is this important? Heck yeah it is. A lot of people don't care what TV they have but rather how it looks. If the furniture was designed to hold a flat screen, those people will buy a flat screen. And you know what? I didn't see one fake tube TV in any of the stores.
