Business, Financial & Legal - Page 140

With Samsung and Apple taking up most profits in the mobile sector, it leaves just scraps to the rest of the market, thus most companies are struggling right now. One of these companies is Sharp, and it looks like Apple analyst Horace Dediu may have discovered something quite worthy of a RumorTT post.

The analyst looked into Apple's 2012 capital expenditures and found some spending which was much higher than Apple previously disclosed. Dediu noticed that Apple had spent $2.3 billion more than it had forecast on "product tooling, manufacturing process equipment and infrastructure".

Dediu believes that the Cupertino-based iDevice maker bailed Sharp out, who were in serious financial issues earlier this year:

With other companies like THQ having serious issues, competitor and much bigger juggernaut Activision have posted record revenue for Q3. The company has reported $841 million, up from $754 million in the same period last year.

Activision also delivered record earnings per share of 20 cents, compared to the third quarter of 2011. Their results beat the company's outlook, which saw them hoping to achieve around 6 cents per share over a revenue of $740 million. These results also blew away analysts' expectation, which are better to compare against the company's non-GAAP earnings.

These calculations, excluding some results, saw Activision reporting 15 cents per share in profit on revenue of $751 million. This kills analyst expectations which were projecting just 8 cents per share in profit over revenues of $708 million.

I wrote an editorial regarding Apple a month ago now, and it seems that my words are ringing more and more true every day that passes. Apple's stock prices hit a peak of just over $700, where virtually every news outlet was covering it.

Now that Apple stock prices are tanking, we're not hearing about it. We're not a biased news site, so you won't just get news when tech companies are doing glowingly well, as it's when they're doing bad that we should really stand up and pay attention. Think about it, in the last month, we've seen some of the biggest releases from Apple, and I would dare say the most amount of releases of top-end products from a company, ever.

We've seen the iPhone 5, fourth-generation new new iPad, the iPad mini, new Retina-based iMacs, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and new iPods. On top of this we've seen the launch of iOS 6, and OS X Mountain Lion. With all of these releases, one would think that Apple would be hitting the high notes and seeing their stock prices climb, considerably.

Ferrari and Apple, what do they have in common? Sleek looks, performance, something else? Well, while they might not have much in common right now, they now have a shared employee. Apple's Senior Vice President, Eddy Cue, has joined Ferrari's Board of Directors, probably to aid in adding electronic technology to the vehicles.

Cue said:

"I am delighted that Eddy Cue, one of the main driving forces behind Apple's range of revolutionary products, has now joined our board," said Ferrari Chairman Luca di Montezemolo. "His huge experience in the dynamic, innovative world of the Internet will be of great assistance to us."

Apple has been hit with a judgement requiring them to pay $368.2 million for infringing on VirnetX Holding Corp's patents regarding virtual-private-network technology. VirnetX's stock has, of course, jumped on the news of the jury's ruling, and went up at least 23 percent to $32.44.

VirnetX has previously sued Microsoft--and won--regarding the exact same technology that they have just successfully sued Apple form. Microsoft decided to hand over $200 million in a settlement, which took place in 2010. The jury ruled that Apple's FaceTime on iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Macs infringe upon four of VirnetX's patents.

"This victory further establishes the importance of our patent portfolio," VirnetX Chief Executive Officer Kendall Larsen said in a statement.

THQ's stock has dropped 50%, and as a big publisher in the gaming industry, they've been experiencing a very dismal 2012. THQ have been firing staff in both external and internal studios, with a lawsuit from Adidas over the incompletion of its micoach app not helping, or their stock prices.

THQ were close to being delisted from NASDAQ fror dropping below the $1.00 prerequisite that allows you on the exchange, but in July they were able to claw themselves back from that threshold, just. They've grown since then, but the latest drop has seen them slide to $1.74 per share, a 42% drop.

On top of this, the company has announced delays for three of their upcoming games: South Park: The Stick of Truth, Company of Heroes 2 and Metro: Last Light. Metro: Last Light was poised for a 2012 release, but has now been pushed back to March 2013. THQ have said that South Park: The Stick of Truth will be released, at the earliest, in April 2013. THQ president, Jason Rubin, has said:

Here I am thinking Apple were really only targeting the use of 'rounded corners' and the 'style' of the iPhone compared to competitors' devices. But, it looks like Samsung's pen-toting Galaxy Note 10.1 has just been added to Apple's on-going lawsuit against Samsung.

But, we haven't even gotten to the best part yet - the Cupertino-based iPhone maker has sought to add Google's Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS to the lawsuit. Apple told US Magistrate Judge, Paul S. Grewal in a federal court in San Jose.

Apple attorney, Andrew Liao, told Judge Grewal that the Galaxy Nexus is the only phone with Jelly Bean that Apple wants to add to the patent complaint. Liao also said that Apple seeks to add 17 devices that could use a stylus, even if the products don't ship with a stylus. Grewal hasn't issued a ruling today, saying he was concerned that if he denied both sides their requests, the companies would file a new round of lawsuits.

HTC have been having a very rough year, where their last quarter results pretty bad, and back in August I reported that Taiwan Central Bank proposed a bailout of the struggling phone maker. Now we're looking at October's sales numbers and for the second month in a row now, revenues have dropped in double digits.

Revenue for HTC is down around 19% from September, with year-over-year figures even worse. We're talking 61% since October of 2011, which is a huge drop, even after last month's drop of 53%. The phone maker could possibly soon reach the point where they would struggle to even meet their very conservative earnings goals.

I really don't expect HTC to be here twelve months from now, and this is going to be the case for most other Android phone makers in the near future. With Google selling subsidised Nexus 4 handsets for $399, why would you buy a smartphone for double the price with the phone maker's UI splashed on top and slow updates of Android? I know I wouldn't.

The IDC's latest numbers are here and it is reporting that tablet numbers have increased by 6.7% in the quarter just gone, and 49.5% year-over-year. Apple enjoying shipping just over half of the 27.8 million slates across the world, but they lost a considerable amount of market share.

The iPad maker had 65.5% of the market in Q2, but dropped down to just 50.4% of the market in Q3 - a huge drop. IDC says that this is because people were holding off for the iPad mini - but I don't agree with that. There can't be that many people in the market knowing three months out that there was definitely going to be a new iPad on the market.

Samsung were number two, increasing their market share to 18.4% thanks to their Galaxy Tab and Note 10.1 products, with Amazon and ASUS having a great quarter also. Kindle Fires and Nexus 7's helped them ship around 2.5 million of each.

Bloomberg news is reporting that Apple may be toying with the idea of designing its own chips for use in its Mac line of computers. As technology grows increasingly mobile, the x86 platform pioneered and championed by Intel draws just too much power and produces too much heat. In order to unify the experience between this mobile market and desktop component, Apple may opt to use its own chips.

By using chips that feature similar architectures in both mobile devices and desktop and laptop systems, its easier for programmers to unify the experience. Apps will theoretically have no problems running on the Mac laptops and desktops due to the common architecture and Apple will be able to use iOS on desktop systems--not an idea I am fond of.

This change in processor would take a good while to implement. The Apple team will have to craft their own processor, either through licensing agreements with ARM, or by developing their own instruction sets. Even still, Apple will want to repeat the success they have seen with the iPhone 5's processor.

We all know smartphones and tablets rule our lives now, but just how much do we use them to surf the Internet? Well, according to the latest data from NetMarketShare, it looks like it's a lot.

Their data points out that smartphones and tablets accounted for 10.3% of all web browsing in October, which is the first time it has broken through the 10% barrier.

More interesting is that mobile browsing was at just 7.2% of all browsing in March, meaning that we're seen an explosion of web browsing on mobile phones in the last few months alone. iOS-based smartphones and tablets like the iPhone and iPad account for around 60% of all web browsing in october 2012. Android devices scooped up a little over 27% of mobile web browsing.

It has not been a good couple of months for Apple. After launching the iPhone 5, their stock took a dive. After launching the iPad mini, their stock took a dive. After announcing executive changes, their stock took a dive. Adding all these up, their stock value has dropped from over $700 to below $600, a pretty large change.

Not only has the stock price been falling, they've suffered a few losses in court. The UK courts ruled that the Galaxy Tab does not infringe on the iPad design copyrights and Apple has been forced to run ads saying so. Well, now the company has suffered another loss at the hands of the court, this time in Mexico.

The Mexican court system has ruled that iFone, a telecommunications and call answering service in Mexico and Latin America, has the legal right to the trademark iFone and, subsequently, iPhone, since it is said the same way. The trademark was registered in 2003, and Apple didn't launch their iPhone until 2007. Oops.

Samsung's lawyers argued that the legal posting by Apple proclaiming that Samsung did not copy Apple's iPad design did not meet what the court ordered Apple to post. The court has agreed and now ruled that Apple has 24 hours to remove the current statement and 48 hours to replace it with a proper account.

"This has received enormous publicity and has perpetuated confusion as to Samsung's entitlement to market the Galaxy tablet computers in issue," a Samsung lawyer said in a written statement to judges. "It has created the impression that the UK court is out of step with other courts."

If you'll recall, the statement had in it verdicts that other courts had found, something Samsung clearly wasn't happy with. The original reasoning behind the requirement to post the notice is solid:

Who thought this time last year that SSD maker OCZ would be in this much trouble? The company have announced their reducing a large number of its staff, with as much as 28% of their non-production staff being out of a job, while workers at the company's Taiwan production facility getting cut down by 32%. The company has said:

They aren't just stopping there, either. OCZ plans to discontinue around 150 product variations, too. OCZ adds:

Microsoft is on the receiving end of a patent troll's lawsuit over its just launched Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. The patent troll in question is SurfCast and they appear to believe that Microsoft's Windows Live Tiles infringe upon a patent filed in 2000 and granted back in 2004.

The patent that SurfCast is using as the basis of their lawsuit is No. 6,724,403. SurfCast describes Tiles as follows:

SurfCast is seeking that the court order Microsoft to "account for and pay to SurfCast all damages caused to SurfCast by reason of Microsoft's patent infringement." They say that Microsoft is encouraging the infringing of the patent through their encouragement of developers to make app tiles for the new Windows Store.

Samsung has finally added the iPhone 5 to their infringement lawsuit, with the South Korean company claiming that all LTE-capable devices that Apple sells are in violation of eight patents the company owns. The lawsuit is already considered weak, as some of Samsung's LTE patents would be considered "standards-essential" and subject to FRAND regulations.

Samsung did threaten to "immediately sue" Apple if the new iPhone was LTE-capable, but at the time were unaware that Apple had already launched LTE-capable iPads a few months earlier. How Samsung would not know this, perplexes me, completely. Apple has maintained their stance, stating that they buy their LTE radios from Qualcomm, who has a full license for the patents and therefore that license extends to its customers.

The biggest issue for Samsung is if their LTE patents will be considered standards-essential when tested in court. The company is now at risk of having some patents ruled FRAND-eligible, which would weaken their portfolio. Worse, is if some of their patents are considered invalid, but Samsung are said to own around 12.2% of all LTE patents. Qualcomm and Nokia both hold equal, or larger stakes in the technology.

In a sea of bad quarterly earnings reports from competitors, ASUS are standing strong with some positive third quarter results this week. The Taiwanese maker of just about everything these days reported a revenue of $3.8 billion with a net income of $230 million.

Revenue saw a rise of 9% year-over-year, with net income boosting up by around 43% in the same period. Revenue is up 18%, with net income up 39%, sequentially. Expectations were lower than this, with over 12 analysts expecting net income to reach just $185 million, meaning ASUS beat analysts' expectations by over 10%. Where is this surge coming from, you aks? Tablets.

ASUS have been able to successfully glide over from the sinking netbook market to the ever-expanding and super-popular tablet market. If we look back to Q2, ASUS shipped 800,000 tablets - fast forward to Q3 and we're looking at tablet shipments hitting 2.3 million, a meteoric rise. Shipment increases can be credited to the great Nexus 7 tablet which ASUS co-developed with Google. ASUS didn't give the goss on just how many Nexus 7's shipped, but it would have to be a chunk of that 2.3 million.

In 2006, mega giant media company Disney acquired Pixar, the makers of huge hits like Toy Story and Up, and have just now announced that they've acquired Lucasfilm. You might know Lucasfilm, they're quite well known for, well, Star Wars among others.

Lucasfilm are also responsible for the Indiana Jones series, and the deal includes other Lucasfilm properties such as Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound. This news isn't the finish yet, as the press release for the announcement also includes news that there will be yet another Star Wars movie.

Disney is aiming for a 2015 release for Star Wars: Episode 7 and that its "long term plan is to release a new Star Wars feature film every two to three years". I guess I should get around to watching the Star Wars movies then, huh?

Bulgarian blogger and digital rights activist, Bogomil Shopova, recently purchased 1.1 million Facebook users' data, including names, IDs and e-mail accounts. Shopova has said that he has no intentions of spamming or hacking those on the list, but is using the acquisition of data to highlight just how easy it was to gather personal information from Facebook.

Where would you buy the data to 1.1 million Facebook accounts in the first place? Well, I thought that too, but Shopova reportedly found the data for sale on the social market website Gigbucks. The seller went by the username "mertem", claimed that the data had been collected through third-party Facebook applications, consisting mostly of active accounts in the US, Canada, Europe and the UK.

The advertisement for the data stated it had "great potential" if you were offering a Facebook, Twitter of other social media-related product or service. Forbes has been told by a Facebook spokesperson that they were looking into the security breach. The representative said that the social network had dedicated security engineers that take aggressive action on reports such as this.

TSMC have something to be happy about right now, posting a record third quarter profit. The company posted a net profit of 49.3 billion New Taiwan dollars ($1.69 billion), which is a 62% jump year-over-year, and beating over 24 analysts' expectations.

TSMC-powered smartphones and tablet demand continue to expand, even in an economy which isn't doing so well. TSMC's flagship 28nm technology has given them an advantage over the competition, and the company has said that is directly responsible for doubling chip shipments in Q3. TSMC have said that chips built on the 28nm process accounted for 13% of total wafer revenue.

Morris Chang, TMSC Chairman, says that the future will be a little dull, expecting revenue to fall in the final three months of 2012. Chipmakers like Intel are scaling their productions back in the fourth quarter, citing reduced demand. Even with Q4 not looking so good, TSMC are optimistic about 2013 and the future, where Chang believes that TSMC will continue to outgrow the semiconductor industry in the coming years, as they has positioned themselves well in the smart device markets.