Hasta La Gadget!

Last quarter, Verizon gained a record high 2.1 million subscribers, but thanks to Hurricane Sandy and pension-related charges, suffered a $1.9 billion net loss. Now that the company is releasing its Q1 2013 figures, are we going to see some of those losses trimmed back? The latest jumble of spreadsheets says yes, revealing that Big V turned a profit of $1.95 billion whilst adding 677,000 new subscribers to its wireless service — giving it a total customer base of 98.9 million users. In the quarter, Verizon activated 7.2 million smartphones, of which 5.9 million were LTE-ready devices. It added that 28 percent of those activations were customers who had defected from other carriers.

The company’s wireline business saw 188,000 FiOS Internet and 169,000 FiOS Video customers, pushing that particular sector’s revenue up to $2.6 billion — 69 percent of Verizon’s consumer revenue. Customers who are hoping to trade up from DSL should take heart that Big Red has switched over 83,000 homes to fiber this year, and plans to upgrade a further 217,000 dwellings before the end of 2013. CEO Lowell McAdam was his usual upbeat self, painting a rosy picture for the company’s future without mentioning that other company that begins with V it’s got to deal with.

Update: Verizon got in touch to clarify that while the company raked in $4.8 billion, a big chunk of that cash which is hived off and sent back to Vodafone, which owns a 45 percent stake in the business. The figures have been amended to reflect the net income attributable to Verizon.

Filed under: Mobile, Verizon

Comments

Reuters is reporting that Hon Hai, the manufacturer that everyone else knows as Foxconn Technology, saw its sales tumble in the first quarter of this year. In the post-Christmas season, the iPhone maker brought in $26.9 billion — a fall of 19 percent compared to the same quarter last year. It’s a strange turn of events, seeing as 2012 turned out to be a record year for the company, but Reuters interprets the figures as being a symptom of a drop in demand for the Apple products that Hon Hai builds and is largely dependent on — an issue that has been brewing for a while now.

Filed under: Cellphones, Apple

Comments

Source: Reuters

Instead of reaping the rewards of putting out a lovely new flagship, HTC has just reported its lowest ever profit — a mere $2.8 million in unaudited net income — during the first three months of this year. That compares to $173 million in the same quarter of last year, representing a pretty catastrophic fall of around 98 percent. Underlying revenue dropped by a third to $1.4 billion. The reason? The top-end smartphone on which the company’s fortunes currently rest, the HTC One, mostly missed its scheduled global arrival date in March due to manufacturing delays, so it effectively didn’t exist during the period in question. It has only just become available to pre-order in the US and won’t start shipping to customers until April 19th. At this rate, the HTC First — the manufacturer’s second big announcement of the year — might actually deserve its name.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

Comments

Source: Bloomberg, HTC

Though we don’t get to see its smartphone wares too often stateside or in Europe, NEC has always said its mobile division was a big part of its business. Now it looks to be trying to fob that arm off to PC venture partner Lenovo, according to unnamed Bloomberg sources. The Japanese company is also said to be eying potential domestic buyers if that doesn’t pan out, and Reuters recently reported that it’s selling retail subsidiary NEC Mobiling to the tune of $850 million. The move is said to be in the works to bolster profitability after two straight years of smartphone operation losses and 10,000 layoffs, but as always, such unattributed material needs to be digested with beaucoup salt.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Lenovo

Comments

Source: Reuters

It’s a hard time to be in the tech-retail sector, a fact that Best Buy knows all too well. The business has announced a fourth quarter net loss of $377 million on revenues of $16.7 billion. Incoming CEO Hubert Joly was upbeat despite the bad numbers, saying that the company’s domestic sales helped offset its failures overseas. At the same time, Best Buy announced that founder Richard Schulze’s attempted bid to buy back his company had failed, as the deadline for his offer expired at the end of February. As such, the company will now concentrate on turning a profit without any Apple store-style reinvention.

Filed under: Misc

Comments

Source: Best Buy, (2)