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Verizon reports Q3 wireless service revenues up 7.5 percent, LTE now available to 250 million people
The folks at Verizon are revelling in their third consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, having reported a 14.3 percent overall increase in earnings per share year-over-year. Wireless service revenues -- not least from us smartphone users -- contributed heavily to that income, growing 7.5 percent compared to the same quarter in 2011 off the back of a "record high" profit margin. The operator attributes these gains to its "4G LTE network advantage," with its LTE service now available to 250 million customers and potential customers across the US, as well as to its "well-received Share Everything Plans and unmatched product portfolio." It added 1.5 million postpaid connections, bringing its total wireless membership to just shy of 96 million souls.
Nikon makes $201 million quarterly profit, nearly 50 percent drop from last year, blames strong yen
Nikon's odd financial calendar means that the camera maker is announcing its first quarter results for 2013. The confusingly-dated documents show that it isn't having the best Spring / Summer, since while it pulled in a net profit of $201 million, that figure is down nearly 50 percent on the $392 million it made in the same period last year. It sold a record number of interchangeable-lens cameras, lenses and a good number of compact cameras, but that was offset against the high cost of the yen. Its other businesses, Precision Equipment and Instruments both suffered thanks to Government spending cuts, a "harsh business climate" and the now age-old problem of the high exchange rate. It's expecting the situation to remain the same in the next three months, with booming camera sales weight against losses in its other businesses -- with a projected profit of $143 million anticipated in Q3.
Sharp pain continues with $1.2 billion loss in Q1, drastically lowered forecast for 2012
Having already scraped through a disastrous 2011, Sharp had been banking on making a small but significant profit this year. Those hopes have now evaporated, with the Japanese manufacturer's forecast of 20 billion yen ($250 million) in operating earnings for 2012 being revised down to a 100 billion yen ($1.25 billion) loss. That dose of reality is largely the result of the quarter just gone, in which hardly anyone appears to have bought an Aquos TV (despite the 90-incher being pretty amazing) or a Sharp-made LCD panel, and the company made a 94 billion yen ($1.2 billion) loss in the space of just three months. According to Reuters, as many as 5,000 staff may lose their jobs in the company's first major round of lay-offs.
Sony releases Q1 2012 financial results, eats $312 million loss
Sony's first-quarter figures for 2012 show that despite the company's optimism three months ago, it's made a net loss of $312 million. It pulled in a whopping $19.2 billion in sales for the three months ending June 30th, partly credited to bringing Sony Mobile fully into the family. However, the cost of restructuring the Mobile Products and Communications Division (of which Sony Mobile is a part) came to $143 million, wiping out the additional gains to record a loss of $356 million. Gaming-wise, the PlayStation maker suffered a $45 million loss as falling sales of the PSP and PS3 were only partially offset by the sales of the PS Vita. There was better news in its imaging division, while sales of compact cameras fell, DSLRs and "Professional" products took up the slack, resulting in a profit of $160 million. In a trend we've seen across the Home Entertainment industry, sales of LCD televisions continued to fall, forcing the company to eat a loss of $126 million. Movie and TV recorded a loss of $62 million, although that's primarily due to a dip in advertising sales in India and the cost of marketing (but not producing) The Amazing Spider-Man, the profits of which won't be recognized until September. Finally, while it spent big to purchase EMI this quarter, big-ticket albums like Usher's Looking 4 Myself and One Direction's Up All Night helped the division make a profit of $92 million. While Sony's treading water to execute Kaz Hirai's "One" Strategy, it's still got $8.4 billion stashed under the mattress, and in the face of lower sales, is hoping that reduced costs will help it make $1.6 billion in profit by the end of March 2013.
MetroPCS 2012 Q2 sees profits skyrocket to $149 million despite losing nearly 200,000 subscribers
MetroPCS has announced that it pulled in $1.3 billion in the second quarter of the year, only slightly more than it managed in the first. It made a profit of $149 million, well up from the $21 million it pulled in between January and March, despite shedding around 200,000 subscribers in the process. The company's deliberately concentrated on raising cash at the expense of new subscriptions in preparation for its 4G LTE for All project, due to begin in the third quarter. It revealed that it now has 700,000 LTE subscribers, up from the 580,000 present in March and that it plans to have a full 10MHz of spectrum allocated for the super-fast mobile standard in "most major metropolitan areas" by the end of the year. As for devices that'll take advantage of the 4G goodness, MetroPCS says that we can expect to see either six or seven new LTE handsets by year's end, each which will be priced between $99 and $149.
Amazon Q2 2012 earnings: net income down 96 percent to $7 million, net sales up 29 percent to $12.83 billion
When internet mega retailer Amazon kicked off its fiscal year this past spring with $13.8 billion in net sales, the prognosis for the quarter ahead was dour, to say the least. At the time, the company projected its Q2 2012 performance would see an operating loss of $40 million to $260 million versus Q2 2011, as well as a slight down tick in revenue at $11.9 billion to $13.3 billion quarter to quarter. Well, the numbers are in and it looks like the forecast was right on the money. The Seattle-based outfit posted $7 million in net income for the quarter, a year over year loss amounting to a whopping 96 percent decrease. As for net sales, that picture's a bit rosier given the 29 percent increase over Q2 2011 that saw the Bezos-backed co. pull in $12.83 billion -- a figure that would have risen to 32 percent were it not for a $272 million hit due to "changes in foreign exchange rates[.]" Operating cash flow for Q2 2012 was down by nearly half at $107MM compared to the same segment last year. Unsurprisingly, the company's budget Kindle Fire tab -- which has enjoyed relatively weak competition up to now -- is still the number one item across Amazon's site, with titles in its Lending Library growing to over 170,000. Bezos also made note of Prime's growth, pegging that subscription offering's catalog of items at 15 million and highlighting the addition of 18,000 movies and TV shows to its streaming service. As for the future, the company expects Q3 net sales to grow by at least 19 percent year-over-year, landing somewhere between $12.9 billion and $14.3 billion, with a projected operating loss of $50 million to $350 million. Hit up the PR after the break for the full load of financial highs and lows.
Sprint's iPhone gamble isn't paying off as 2012 Q2 figures reveal $629 million operating loss
Sprint's second quarter figures have arrived, showing that the company's billion-dollar gamble on the iPhone isn't working right now. While it sold 1.5 million Apple-branded handsets in the three month period (40 percent to new and postpaid customers), it recorded an operating loss of $629 million and a colossal net loss of $1.4 billion -- compared to an operating loss of $255 million and a net loss of $863 million in the first quarter. Operating revenues of $8.8 billion improved on those in the first quarter by a single percent -- mostly due to higher service fees from its wireless offerings. It's also grown its cash reserves, up from $128 million last quarter to $267 million today, and can point to 442,000 postpaid and 141,000 new prepaid subscribers pushing the company's customer base up to 56 million nationwide -- mentioning that 60 percent of former Nextel users chose to remain with Sprint during the enforced change. The figures reveal that Sprint's eating around $782 million due to the shutdown of the Nextel platform and a further $184 million to end leases on antenna sites for the moribund network. It's also having to take a hit of $204 million due to its investment into infrastructure partner Clearwire. It's affirmed its $1 billion lending facility, contingent upon purchasing gear from Ericsson to help build its LTE network, which it aims to have installed in 12,000 sites by the end of the year. Of course, that purchase was prompted by the collapse of Philip Falcone's doomed LightSquared project, which caused the Now Network to lose $66 million in cash and its childhood innocence when it comes to trusting other people. Update: Big Yellow also mentioned that it has no plans to adopt a shared data plan to follow AT&T and Verizon.
ARM sees profit surge 23 percent, tests forecasters' patience
Just when financial boffins expected ARM's consistent double-digit growth to slow-down, the company has beaten their projections with a 23 percent rise in pre-tax profit compared to Q2 of last year. It made £66.5 million ($103 million) in profit from £135.5 million ($213 million) in revenue from its numerous mobile and low-power processor design licensees. Analysts expected lower performance for the simple reason that the world's biggest chip-makers have warned of tougher "macroeconomic" times ahead -- rival Intel has been careful to dampen people's hopes for its next quarter, for example, and Qualcomm (a major ARM customer) has also reduced its forecasts. Still, it's all just different shades of rolling in it.
Netflix Q2 2012 earnings: 530,000 more US subscribers and a return to profitability
Netflix recently let it drop that its users clocked in more than one billion hours of content-viewing in the month of June alone, although the big question for CEO Reed Hastings is how that relates to the company's subscriber base. The results are in from its Q2 2012 earnings report, and it's claiming 27.56 million streaming subscribers worldwide, up from 26 million last quarter. In the US alone that includes 23.94 million customers, after it reported 23.4 million in Q1, while DVD customers dropped by 850k to 9.24 million. While the number of new subscribers wasn't as high as some had hoped, the good news is the company is finally back in the black, with $889 million in revenue providing $6 million in net income. On the flip side, a plan to launch service in an "additional attractive European market" in Q4 is expected to result in temporary losses, but we'll find out more about those plans later in Q3. One other issue that has been resolved is the search for a new Chief Marketing Officer resulting in the hiring of Kelly Bennett, formerly a marketing executive with Warner Bros. This morning Verizon and Redbox began to carefully pull back the cover on their competing offering, and Amazon has also been making significant waves in the space. However in response, Netflix says Amazon and Hulu Plus have yet to gain meaningful traction in relation to its viewing hours, and it expects Redbox Instant to face a "big challenge" to break into the existing top 3. Its current content deal with Epix will lose online exclusivity "shortly" although it will still offer those titles, we'll see if any of the competition joins in. Their biggest competition however, is expected to come from efforts like Comcast's new X1 and Sky's Now TV, while for HBO, the possibility of cooperation is actually raised (again). We'll see if that happens or if there are any more juicy details revealed on the investor call in a few minutes.
Zynga posts loss, beats estimates following OMGPOP acquisition
There's good news and bad news for Zynga's financials. The good news first: Thanks to its purchase of Draw Something developer OMGPOP and some strong releases, the social game publisher beat quarterly revenue estimates from Wall Street, growing its year-over-year revenue to $321 million from $243 million. Zynga says it expects to make from $1.425 billion to $1.5 billion this year in total.But the bad news is that outside of that big purchase, the company isn't showing the growth that Wall Street would like. Total monthly active users were up 24 percent, but analysts would prefer to see even more, and claim that Zynga only had a good quarter because of the acquisition.Zynga also lost $85 million for the quarter. "They had to acquire to raise their numbers, but you're not going to be able to do that too many times," said Arvind Bhatia at Sterne Agee.So Zynga will need to prove that it can sustain its growth outside of major acquisitions if it wants to keep stock prices up. We don't know much about the financial world, but would planting more corn help?
Amazon's Q1 2012 earnings: net income down 35 percent to $130 million, net sales at $13.18 billion
It's no Apple-sized quarter, but you'd need to be on HGTV's Million Dollar Rooms a handful of times over to scoff at Amazon's Q1 2012 earnings. After reporting $177 million in net earnings last quarter (on $17.43 billion in revenue), the online sales behemoth has today registered $13.18 billion in net sales -- proudly reporting that said tally was up from the $9.86 billion in its Q1 a year ago. Excluding the $56 million unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, net sales would have grown 34 percent compared with first quarter 2011. As for operating income? That checked in at $192 million (compared to $322 million Q1 2011), with the outfit noting that the "unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter on operating income was $4 million." Net income also sank 35 percent from $201 million a year ago, but it still left Amazon with $130 million more in the bank than it had just three months ago. It's important to note that the outfit didn't have "the holidays" here to help out, but it's still a bit worrisome to investors when profit margin shrinks. Focusing on more positive things, CEO Jeff Bezos noted that Amazon has "over 130,000 new, in-copyright books that are exclusive to the Kindle Store," again reminding the world that Amazon Prime members can "borrow them for free with no due dates." We're also told that the Kindle Fire remains the top, most gifted and most wished for product across its entire store, while pointing out that the North American sales segment was up 36 percent from Q1 2011 (reaching $7.43 billion). Our overseas comrades -- specifically, Amazon's UK, German, Japanese, French, Chinese, Italian and Spanish sites -- accounted for $5.76 billion in sales, up 31 percent year-over-year. Worldwide media sales saw a 19 percent uptick to $4.71 billion, while global electronics and "other merchandise" saw sales grow a whopping 43 percent to $7.97 billion. Notably, the company continually banged on unfavorable exchange rates, so if you're looking for a place to heap blame... well, there you go.
HTC predicts 55 percent revenue jump, could hint at strong One sales
HTC's results for Q1 2012 were a long way short of spectacular, but they came too early to see any impact from sales of its latest wares -- particularly the flagship One X and the ambitious mid-range One S. According to Reuters, the Taiwanese manufacturer now predicts that its revenue will leap by 55 percent in Q2, compared to that bad last quarter. That kind of growth equates to around $3.56 billion, which isn't so impressive when you compare it to the same quarter last year, when turnover broke records and was around 20 percent higher, but it's still an encouraging sign that this company could reap what it sowed at MWC.
Verizon's vitals: quarterly revenue up five percent to $28 billion, earnings of $1.7 billion
Verizon is remembering how to turn to subscribers into cash, reporting consolidated revenues up 4.6 percent year-over-year to $28 billion and earnings of $1.7 billion -- boosting earnings-per-share by 15 percent. By comparison, revenues were $27 billion in Q1 2011, and a mere $18 billion last quarter, which resulted in a $2 billion net loss. Big Red's performance is now as strong as ever, with subscriber numbers up five percent to 93 million, and with 47 percent of those customers using insanely profitable devices called smartphones. On the TV and broadband side side, its FiOS unit now tops five million internet customers, and added a net total of 180,000 video subscribers. And that new $30 upgrade fee hasn't even kicked in yet.
Nokia: Two million Lumia phones sold in Q1 but profits still falling
Nokia's announced preliminary information on its forthcoming Q1 results due on April 19th. It's reportedly sold €4.2 billion worth of phones, €2.3 billion coming from the sale of 71 million dumbphones and €1.7 billion coming from smart devices. On the upside, sales of the Lumia handsets are still growing, selling two million of the series in the last three months alone. However, "competitive industry dynamics" and the cost of its painful transition into a modern smartphone player have meant the numbers aren't too pleasing. The figures mean that the company will make a loss of around three percent below "break even," but Stephen Elop remains bullish, saying that his team is "continuing to increase the clock speed of the company" and that "the change is tangible."
HTC's unaudited Q1 2012 financials: revenue down by 35 percent
HTC's unaudited financials have just hit the wires and it looks like the negative trends from last year are continuing. For the first quarter of 2012, revenues are down nearly 35 percent year-on-year, with revenues of 67,790 million Taiwanese dollars (around $2.3 billion) for the period. Operating income was 5,099 million Taiwanese dollars (roughly $173 million) and profits after tax 4,464 million Taiwanese dollars ($151 million). The company must be hoping that this represents the end of the nasty hangover from its previous scatter-gun approach to phone production. Now that it's gone with the sleek and slender One series lineup, we'll see how well the company's about-turn does in the next two quarters.
Can the iPad sustain its incredible yearly growth?
Horace Dediu of Asymco examined the history of Apple's iPad sales since 2010 and calculated that its grown at an astonishing rate of 150 percent each year. Based on Apple's stellar iPad launch weekend, Dediu believes this phenomenal growth is sustainable. As Philip Elmer-DeWitt points out, Dediu goes above Wall Street's current consensus and predicts Apple will sell 12.2 million tablets by the end of this quarter. [Via Fortune's Apple 2.0]
Acer Financials: meager 2011 Q4 profit, massive annual loss
Acer was hoping for the gloom to lift after two bad quarters, but it can hardly call its latest financials stellar. It scraped a slender $2.4 million profit in the quarter, which wasn't enough to prevent the company posting an overall annual loss of $212 million. It blamed one off charges and operational and strategic adjustments (though no mention of the impending war with Lenovo over Gianfranco Lanci) for the bad year. The terse release (after the break) claims the business is becoming "more healthy and stable," which is a good way to paint a quarter-on-quarter drop of 98.4 percent turnover.
Sprint announces Q4 2011 results: the iPhone brings in 720,000 new customers
Following its bittersweet Q3, the latest financial report from Sprint this quarter offers up another mixed bag of news. Net operating losses totalled $438 million, more than the $139 million posted in the same quarter last year. It suffered a staggering $1.3 billion net loss (much of that due to upfront costs associated with launching the iPhone), dwarfing the Q3's $301 million losses. Operating revenue increases were, however, the largest in the last five years, up to $8.72 billion from $8.3 billion. Net subscribers now total 55 million, with 33 million postpaid, 14.8 million prepaid and around 7.2 million arriving from wholesale, adding an extra 1.6 million Sprint customers in the last quarter. This was also the first time in a long while that new subscribers on the Sprint platform outpaced losses at the Nextel and wireline businesses. Sprint hoped to see its iPhone draw customers into its network, putting it toe-to-toe with the bigger carriers, and it largely did, with 40 percent of the 1.8 million iPhones sold landing directly in the hands of new customers. However, the higher subsidy costs of the iPhone was also responsible for these tougher financial results. Last year also saw the tentative launch of Sprint's LTE network, and that's where the future appears to be for the carrier, with its forward-looking statement hinging on exactly how fast they're able to grab the 4G bull by the horns and get it into their customers' hands. Compatibility with Clearwire's next generation network is mentioned here, as is the "financial performance of Clearwire and its ability to build, operate, and maintain its 4G network." Lightsquared, however, was conspicuously absent from Sprint's future machinations.
AT&T's iPhone "sales" versus "activations": Doing the Math
Love Apple gear? Like math? TUAW's Doing the Math series examines the numbers and the science behind the hardware and software. Several sites -- including TUAW -- reported yesterday that 80% of all smartphones AT&T sold in Q411 were iPhones, based on AT&T's quarterly earnings report. On closer inspection, however, there's a subtle but important detail that we overlooked in AT&T's wording. It reported "9.4 million smartphone sales" but "7.6 million iPhone activations" (emphasis mine). So, consider the following series of events. Alice buys an iPhone 3GS back in 2009 on a two-year contract. In late 2011, she treats herself to a new iPhone 4S -- that's both a sale and an activation for AT&T. She gives the 3GS to her husband, the long-suffering Bob, who can finally ditch his flip phone. Bob needs service though. His "new" 3GS is locked to AT&T -- unlike in many other countries around the world, most American carriers won't voluntarily unlock even out-of-contract handsets. Even if it were unlocked, though, it's not compatible with either the CDMA networks used by Verizon and Sprint, nor the oddball 3G frequencies used by T-Mobile USA. Finally, AT&T refuses to support iPhones on its pay-as-you-go GoPhone plan (although if Bob read TUAW he'd know he could work around this). So, with no other choices, Bob rings up AT&T and starts an iPhone contract so he can use the old handset as more than just an oddly-shaped iPod touch. At the end of this process, AT&T has closed one new sale -- but counted two activations, one for Alice's new iPhone 4S and one for Alice's old iPhone 3GS in Bob's name. This means the 7.6 million activations includes some double counting, and can't directly be compared to sales. We reached out to AT&T's Seth Bloom to confirm whether our reasoning was true. He said "You're right that activations are a bit different than sales -- and activations includes things like gifted iPhones as you suggest." However, he also added that "In this quarter, the number of activations from things like gifted iPhones doesn't change the math much. We aren't sharing a number, but gifted phones is a relatively small portion of total activations." How much might a "relatively small portion" be? Let's revisit those numbers: 9.4 million smartphone sales and 7.6 million iPhone activations. Suppose that 10% of all those iPhone activations were to used handsets. In other words, out of all of those brand-new iPhone sales AT&T made in the last three months, about one in ten of them (a virtual cookie to any commenter who spots why I had to say "about" there) were made to a person who a) already had an older iPhone and b) then proceeded to sell or give that handset away to someone else, who reconnected it back to AT&T's network. That would mean that AT&T activated 6.84 million new iPhones and 760,000 old ones. In turn, that means that the iPhone took 73% of AT&T's overall smartphone sales. The other 27% will be split between Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone 7. More generally, we can plot a graph of how the iPhone's market share changes as a function of the recycle factor or the proportion of activations which went to reused handsets: If we revisit AT&T's statement we can also see that "82 percent of postpaid sales were smartphones." This means, remarkably, that unless 25% of iPhone activations went to reused handsets (which seems unlikely in light of Bloom's comments) then over half of all contract phones AT&T sold were iPhones. This story is repeated on Verizon too. The bottom line is: Apple kicked all kinds of posterior in the smartphone market during the last three months of 2011. Can it continue to do so in 2012? It might not be able to maintain quite this stupendous a lead. The timing of the iPhone 4S launch (in autumn, versus the previous summer iPhone introductions) likely boosted sales by causing some greater-than-usual pent-up demand. Supporting this hypothesis, Tim Cook admitted that sales of the older models waned between July and September. It'll be fascinating to see what this massive quarter does to the overall smartphone market share of iOS versus Android in the coming months.
Samsung 2011 Q4 earnings official: $42 billion in sales, $4.7 billion operating profit
It might not be making as much money as the competition in Cupertino, but that doesn't mean Samsung isn't raking in cash at an astonishing clip. We reported earnings estimates a few weeks ago, but now it's official that the firm posted a 5.3 trillion won ($4.7 billion) operating profit in Q4 2011. That represents over a 2 trillion won ($1.8 billion) increase year over year. In all, it pulled in 47.3 trillion won ($42 billion) in sales, thanks in no small part to the over 300 million phones Sammy sold last year. While mobile accounted for roughly 40 percent of company sales and half of its operating profit (2.6 trillion won, or $2.3 billion), its semiconductor business did almost as well, raking in 2.3 trillion won ($2 billion) in profit over the same period. Samsung's Display Panel business outperformed 2010 -- buoyed by strong sales in LED televisions -- as sales were up almost 20 percent, to 8.55 trillion won ($7.6 billion).Well the call just finished up, and Sammy provided some prognosication for 2012. It anticipates the mobile business to continue to grow, with LTE and and new market segments (read: Galaxy Note) helping drive sales. TV sales are also expected to remain on the uptick, as Samsung anticipates demand to continue growing due in part to the London Olympics and roll-out of more Smart TVs. Feel free to check out all the numbers giving Samsung reason for its optimism at the source link below.
