Samsung Predicts Strong Second Quarter

Samsung said it expected its second-quarter operating profits to be between $1.7 and $2 billion, which would be a fivefold increase from the previous quarter.

This was the consumer electronics company's first-ever earnings guidance ahead of its earnings announcement, and Samsung said this is because it "believes that growing interest in the company's quarterly earnings and competing forecasts have led to confusion in the market ahead of the recent earnings release announcements." The company reported its first-ever operating loss in the fourth quarter before swinging to a narrow profit in the first quarter.

An Enterprise 2.0 tour about SAP's Business Intelligence deal with Jive Software, which lets you embed dynamic analytics BusinessObjects Crystal Reports widgets inside your ClearSpace blog posts. Fritz Nelson spoke with Joe Kosco, the marketing Manager of Network Automation, about the release of their new AutoMate 7. From the exhibit floor at Interop Las Vegas 2009, InformationWeek Global CIO editor Bob Evans explains the issues on attendees' agendas, including cloud computing, virtualization, unified communications, and reducing infrastructure costs.
An Enterprise 2.0 tour about SAP (NYSE: SAP)'s Business Intelligence deal with Jive Software, which lets you embed dynamic analytics BusinessObjects Crystal Reports widgets inside your ClearSpace blog posts.
Like many companies, Samsung has experienced some tough times due to the global economic recession, and it has implemented a major reorganization strategy that created two major divisions that cover its cell phones, consumer electronics, liquid crystal displays, and computer chips businesses. Industry analysts said the strong second quarter comes from most divisions surpassing expectations, and the chip and LCD divisions are expected to post a marginal profit after reporting losses in the previous quarter.

The company's mobile phone division is also expected to do well, as it had a strong first quarter with a higher-than-expected profit margin that bestedNokia (NYSE: NOK), and a 2% growth in market share. While Samsung makes a lot of revenue off entry-level phones in emerging markets, the company also has a strong lineup of high-end smartphones like the Omnia HD. The world's second-largest cell phone maker still said the overall market could decline by about 10% for 2009, but it still expects to ship more than 200 million phones this year.

Samsung will give its official second-quarter earnings report July 24.

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Apple to pass Nokia in smartphone share by 2013

Apple's share of the smartphone market is growing quickly enough that it could overtake Nokia's in as little as four years, according to data from Generator Research. The analyst group sees the market almost reversing itself from its situation today and believes Nokia will tumble from about 40 percent share today to just 20 percent in 2013. iPhones, meanwhile, should accelerate and hit 33 percent of the market at the same point. Apple would match Nokia's share sometime in 2011 and ship as many as 77 million phones that year.

The apparent flip is expected to come about both through ideal conditions for Apple as well as an inability for Nokia to pay attention to smartphones as much as it would like. Generator sees Apple as entering a "golden age" of fast growth both because of the combination of the iPhone and the App Store, with one driving sales of the other. It also has the benefit of selling both to smartphone users as well as to existing iPod owners. A crossover device appealing to high end media phone users, such as the $99 iPhone 3G, should also give the company a boost.

Nokia, in turn, is seen as a victim of its own emphasis on low-cost phones. As it makes most of its current money selling budget devices in developing countries where there's still room to sell phones in that category, the company doesn't have an actual financial stake in keeping smartphones at the top. The Finnish giant is likely to try and defend its territory but may be only half-hearted in funding its efforts as the smartphone business won't be where Nokia makes its true profits.

Much of Nokia's already ongoing decline in share is commonly attributed to its own slow response to competitors. While it responded to the BlackBerry's popularity outside of work relatively quickly with the E71, the company took a year and a half to react to the iPhone's debut with its own touchscreen phone, the 5800 XpressMusic, and has only just launched its second in the form of the N97. The rapid expansion of the iPhone's App Store also pushed Nokia to launch the Ovi Store as a central portal for software despite running its N-Gage and music stores with modest success for considerably longer.

Generator is convinced that Apple could speed up its sales further by more tightly integrating the iPhone app ecosystem with carriers, which the researchers believe would let developers target specific networks and perform feats that aren't normally possible with Apple's carrier-neutral strategy. Apps could be written to send individual or group SMS messages for alerts, for example, or could establish calls and customize ringtones.

Filed under: iPhone, industry, mobile phones, Apple
Other story tags: Nokia, App Store, Ovi

Apple and Nokia prepping pico projector phones

Apple and Nokia are planning to go head to head with the launch of mobile phones with built-in pico projectors, reports suggest.

Taiwanese news source DigiTimes reports that a company called Foxlink, a subsidiary of Apple's iPhone manufacturing partner Foxconn, is currently developing its own micro projector tech.

It's thought this technology will make its way into integrated devices as early as this year with Apple due to offer an iPhone projector and Nokia presumably an N-series device with projection.

The mini projectors would see the new handsets capable of projecting images and video, usually in VGA resolution, up to around 60 inches.

DigiTimes states: "International brand vendors, including Nokia, Samsung Electronics and Apple, reportedly all plan to launch handsets with built-in micro projectors by the end of this year, indicated the sources, adding that Foxlink is likely to benefit from the emerging trend due to its strong business relationships with Nokia and Apple".

Samsung has already announced one pico projector handset, the I7410, that was revealed for the European market at this year's Mobile World Congress event.

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PetroVietnam General’s H1 profit rises on Nokia phone sales

The Ho Chi Minh City-based company, which also offers services such as lodging, storage and warehousing, said in a statement on its website its pretax profit rose 19 percent on higher-than-expected sales of cassava and Nokia mobile phones.

This means it has already achieved 76 percent of its full-year profit target of at least VND100 billion, said the statement, released on July 3 after the market closed.

The company was able to maintain high sales of Nokia mobile phones and increase sales of other information technology products, such as laptops by Hewlett-Packard Co. and Lenovo Group Ltd., the statement said.

The company recorded shipments of more than 250,000 metric tons of dried cassava slices to China and South Korea in the first six months from January to June, exceeding its target, according to the statement, which did not give comparable figures.

Revenue reached VND3.8 trillion in the period, equal to 69 percent of this year’s forecast of VND5.6 trillion, the statement said. This was a 36 percent rise from first-half revenue of VND2.8 trillion a year earlier.

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