Hasta La Gadget!

Earnings calls tend to be about as exciting as a stale piece of white bread, but every once in a while something juicy falls through — and morsels are filtering out of the earnings call that Motorola held this morning. Here are the biggies:

• We hope you like Blur, because it’s not going anywhere. CEO Sanjay Jha says that “the majority of our new smartphone [sic] this year will feature” the platform, and that it’ll “include enhancements to address the prosumer segment of the market.” They’re looking to rope in media (music, photos, and so on) the same way they did social networking, boost enterprise compatibility for white collar types that only have one phone, and improve network efficiency to ease up on battery drain. All good things, we reckon.
• Feature phones in Moto’s range will “meaningfully decline” as it heads toward planned profitability in the fourth quarter through higher-margin smartphones. Android isn’t the only game plan, though — it’ll continue to develop its ultra low-end handsets for emerging markets.
• Following the Nexus One’s lead, Jha said that it’ll launch “at least one direct-to-consumer device with Google.” That matches up nicely with a statement he made during our CES interview that “there will be multiple devices [launched through Google] and I think that we said ‘yes’ today that probably this next device is our device.”

All told, we have every reason to believe that this’ll be an exciting year for Moto fans — and that HTC needs to keep a close eye on these guys.

Motorola will ‘broaden the scope’ of Blur, sell a phone through Google this year originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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91.2 million total customers, 2.2 million of whom joined in Q4, $27.1 billion operating revenue in the quarter, and you still make a loss? Well, in fact Verizon made a tidy profit, which may be considered comparable to Google and Intel’s latest results, but its culling of jobs at the end of last year cost it a whopping $3 billion (presumably in redundancy settlements). Still, the company looks buoyant with that quarterly revenue number growing by 9.9 percent year-on-year, and CEO Ivan Seidenberg noting that significant costs were incurred in setting up for a 4G network deployment in 2010. Our favorite nugget of info? The “cash expense per customer” per month number: $27.62, which presumably includes Droid subsidies and the like. How does that compare to what you’re giving VZW each month?

[Thanks, Josta]

Verizon lost $653 million last quarter in spite of increasing revenues originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jan 2010 03:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We don’t know just how quickly Palm (or Elevation Partners, for that matter) thought it’d become profitable following the release of webOS, but it’s not there quite yet — the company is in the process of outing its earnings for the second quarter of fiscal year 2010 right now, and in a word, they’re still in the red. The good news is that it’s a marked improvement from last quarter — they’ve gone from a $164.5M GAAP net loss to an $85.4M one this time around. On a non-GAAP gross basis, they actually made $5.5M, which is up from $2.8M a quarter earlier. They’ve got $590 million in cash and other “short-term investments” on the book right now, which seems like it should be enough to keep the company going without a profit or additional cash infusion for at least a few additional quarters, but then again, burn rate is going to vary with just how much hardware and software R&D they’re doing and the kinds of carrier deals they’re scoring. We bet they’re looking forward to this Verizon business going down, eh?

Update: Palm’s specifically saying that they’re looking to grow carrier and geographic coverage right now — a good plan, if we say so ourselves.

Update 2: They’ve sold 784,000 phones in the quarter, which compares to 823,000 in the last — a 5 percent drop. That’s up 41 percent from the same quarter a year ago… but yeah, of course it’s going to be way up from the pre-webOS days.

Update 3: Over 800 apps in the catalog so far, once they graduate from the Early Access Program exclusivity, Palm foresees a “flood” of apps. No plans right now to change SDK strategy to a more native development environment.

Palm loses $85.4 million in latest reported quarter — hey, it’s an improvement originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple‘s fiscal Q4 2009 conference call is just about to begin, but the press release is already out and about. Wondering how Jobs and Company did? Precisely like you thought they would: they’re making out like gangbusters over there. While the rest of the world slowly sees profits inching back up, Apple’s relishing in $1.67 billion worth of net profit it pulled in from $9.87 billion in revenue. A year ago, the outfit managed to post a quarterly profit of “just” $1.14 billion, and we’re also told that gross margin was up 36.6 percent. It should be noted that international sales accounted for a whopping 46 percent of this quarter’s revenue, and Mac computer sales managed to shoot up some 17 percent compared to the year-ago quarter. In keeping with Apple’s own acknowledgment that the standalone iPod is dying, sales of the iconic media player dipped 8 percent year-over-year (10.2 million units were sold), while 7.4 million iPhones were moved representing a 7 percent uptick from this period a year ago.

Stevie J himself is quoted as saying that Apple is “thrilled to have sold more Macs and iPhones than in any previous quarter,” and in case you haven’t noticed, the holiday quarter hasn’t even been completed yet. Oh, and if you were looking for bread crumbs as for what’s on deck, chew on this: “We’ve got a very strong lineup for the holiday season and some really great new products in the pipeline for 2010.” Great new products, you say? Would one of them happen to include some sort of, say, tablet PC?

Catch our updates after the break…

Continue reading Apple reports fiscal Q4 earnings: $1.67b profit, Mac sales way up, iPod sales down, ‘great new products’ for 2010

Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Laptops

Apple reports fiscal Q4 earnings: $1.67b profit, Mac sales way up, iPod sales down, ‘great new products’ for 2010 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HTC’s been on somewhat of a hot streak here lately, but word on the street has it that the aforesaid outfit may not be able to ship all of its forthcoming handsets on time. A new Wall Street Journal report on falling revenue in the HTC camp notes that an undisclosed amount of delays, a larger-than-anticipated drop in contract orders and lower-than-expected sales in China could lead to drooping income in the short term, and some analysts are pointing out that the company’s average selling price per phone is sliding due to looming Android competition from the likes of Motorola and Sony Ericsson. Aside from the Touch Pro2 that’ll probably never, ever land on Sprint, HTC has about a gazillion other rumored handsets on the horizon, but it’s hard to know for sure which “product launches” are expected to be stalled. So, is HTC secretly retooling a smattering of its handsets in order to stay one step ahead of SE and Moto? Or are old fashioned supply chain inefficiencies to blame?

Filed under: Cellphones

HTC sees revenue falling due to “delays in product launches” originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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