Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 255

It's that time of year where many companies report their Q1 financial results, or if you're Nintendo, you report your entire fiscal year. Nintendo reports its finances only once a year (annually) as opposed to 4 times like most companies (quarterly). This report is the first time in 30 years that Nintendo has reported a loss.

A lot of this is due to the financial climate that is affecting everyone worldwide. Additionally, the gaming market has changed as of late, due to the availability of high quality, free, mobile games. The 3-way struggle between Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony hasn't exactly helped the market either. While competition is good, it does cause companies to lower prices to compete, sometimes below cost.

In August, Nintendo was forced to cut the price of the 3DS by 40%. A cut that big is never good for the bottom line. Between the price cut, and a few popular new 3D games such as Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land, they managed to sell 13.53 units last fiscal year. This time around they hope to sell 18.5 million.

Apple's super-powered earnings call during the week has impressed the entire tech industry, but Topeka Capital Markets analyst Brian White has said that his target for Apple shares in the near future will be $1,111. Apple are poised to become the world's first trillion-dollar company when its share price hits $1,072.

With White throwing his dart toward a $1,111 per share estimate, he is predicting that Apple's market cap will hit $1 trillion sometime in 2013. Brian White has said:

Apple's performance once again demonstrated how quickly Apple fever is spreading around the world, and this trend continues to drive meaningful upside in the company's financial results. We believe the negative vibes that have held back the stock over the past couple of weeks will now be replaced with the fear of missing the next leg up in the stock price that we are forecasting will reach $1,111 over the next year.

Apple had an amazing, record-breaking quarter and tech sites across the world were grinning whilst posting this news. It was amazing, and huge. HTC also announced its own figures, but didn't get anywhere near the same press.

HTC reported a massive 70-percent drop in profits, taking in just $151.5 million during the quarter. The blame? HTC says its the iPhone 4S. HTC Chief Executive Peter Chou has specifically singled out the iPhone 4S for HTC's crappy financial results during an analyst call two days ago. Chou remained confident that HTC had better times ahead of them, but he was also razor sharp when saying that there's no chance HTC will see a return to the times when they took 50-percent of their revenue from the US. Chou adds:

A major challenge we faced last year was the big drop in sales in the U.S. because of competition from the iPhone 4S.

Time for another update in the oh so fun battle that is Oracle vs Google. Today former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz took the stand as a witness for the defense and proceeded to dispute Oracle's claim and support Google's. He testified that Google did not need a license to use the Java APIs. Oracle contends that Google violated some of its patents around Java and its APIs when producing Android.

When questioned by the defense about whether Java APIs were considered proprietary code of Sun, he said "No. These are open APIs, and we wanted to bring in more people...we wanted to build the biggest tent and invite as many people as possible." His answers corroborated Eric Schmidt's in that what Google did was and is legal.

"My understanding is that what we were doing was permissible because of the sum of my experiences and interactions I had," Schmidt said. He added that he was "very comfortable that what we were doing was both legally correct and consistent" with the policies of Google and Sun.

In another attempt to further separate Apple from the rest of the world, Apple has just had a planning request approved to build a new off-campus cafeteria for employees. The idea behind this is to prevent competitors from overhearing those common conversations that often take place during lunch. This way employees can discuss secret projects without the fear of the idea being stolen.

The new facility will be 21,468 square feet and will be a short walk from Apple's headquarters. The cafeteria will provide cafes, meeting rooms, lounge areas and courtyard facilities. Apple's director of real estate spells out why the new building will be beneficial:

We like to provide a level of security so that people and employees can feel comfortable talking about their business, their research and whatever project they're engineering without fear of competition sort of overhearing their conversations. That is a real issue today in Cupertino because we've got other companies here in our same business.

Another partial win comes for Motorola today as a judge sides with Motorola that Microsoft is infringing on 4 of the 5 alleged patents. The preliminary decision from US ITC Judge David Shaw sides with Motorola that 4 of Motorola's patents are being infringed upon by Microsoft's Xbox 360.

Two of the patents involve Wi-Fi, two cover H.264 video, and one describes communication between consoles and accessories (5,319,712, 5,357,571, 6,069,896, 6,980,596 and 7,162,094). Shaw found that one of the Wi-Fi patents isn't being infringed upon, but upheld the claims regarding the others.

His ruling will be gone over by a six-person committee similar to the Apple ruling that was reported yesterday. Motorola, here again, is trying to ban the selling of the Xbox 360 in the United States, and unlikely as it may be, it could happen. It is probably, however, just a way for Motorola to gain leverage with Microsoft.

Good news everyone! Even with a somewhat bleak financial report for Q1 2012, AMD has managed to snag some market share back from rival chip giant Intel. While it may not be much, some more market share is better than nothing and should help the company financially going forward if this trend continues.

AMD's market share went from 18.2% to 19.1% whereas rival Intel's dropped from 81% down to 80.2%, according to Mercury Research. AMD remains strong in the desktop market where it has 43% of the market, which is the same as last year. "When you look on it as a quarterly basis, desktop has had some strength relative to mobile," said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.

AMD's mobile segment saw a boost, however, as users opted for cheaper laptops, many of which contained AMD processors. "One of the things that is clear is that the market is adopting new technology faster than it used to. I would expect Ivy Bridge to ramp aggressively," McCarron said. AMD is behind Intel one generation, so keeping competitive isn't the easiest of tasks.

If you're sitting in a swish hotel lobby one day soon and a few men in suits walk in with a suitcase with a sticker on the side saying "Money Inside", and they're all wearing Intel Inside shirts or something to that effect, you've just witnessed a deal between Intel and Cray for $140 million.

Cray are handing over technological patents to Intel, where they'll receive $140 million in cash for them. The patents include hardware patents concerning interconnect technology that it used to link up multiple processors together to exchange data at high speed. Cray's shares jumped because of the news, with an increase of 24-percent to $8.75 in pre-trading, and are currently climing past $9.

Part of the deal includes around 80 of the 800 employees Cray has will be joining Intel. Cray CEO Peter Ungaro has said:

In the David vs. Goliath case that is Motorola vs. Apple, Motorola has gotten won a partial U.S. International Trade Commission judge's ruling in its attempts to block the import of Apple's iPhone and iPad. The judge has found that Apple has indeed violated one of the four patents that Motorola has accused Apple of violating.

The patent that the judge feels Apple has violated is one that relates to 3G technology. Bloomberg notes that "Pender's findings are subject to review by the six-member commission, which can block imports that infringe U.S. patents." However, in Germany, the same case was heard by another judge and the judge said that Apple hasn't done anything wrong.

"These are long wars, and it's one more battle in the war," said Carl Howe, an analyst with Yankee Group. "It's about accumulating as much intellectual property as possible. It's not good for innovation if you do that, but that seems to be where we're heading."

We were staring down the barrel of Facebook's initial public offering (IPO) which is two weeks from now, but according to people "familiar with the matter", the social networking companies recent acquisitions and other business distractions are threatening to delay the IPO, reports CNBC.

Management at Facebook have been looking at a May offering, with a roadshow launch somewhere around May 7, and the start of trading late the week of the 14th, people with knowledge of the deal said. But recently, founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has been focusing more on running the business and acquiring other companies such as Instagram, than preparing for the share sale.

This is according to the same people leaking this information, which is reportedly making it hard for him and other managers to focus 100-percent on the IPO preparations. Facebook is now looking to delay their roadshow a week from May 7 to May 14, or possibly the very end of May. This would delay initial trading until mid-June.