Strategy Analytics: Android claimed nearly 80 percent of Q2 smartphone share

Strategy Analytics Android represents nearly 80 percent of phones shipped in Q2

Multiple analyst groups recently gave us a look at second quarter smartphone market share by the manufacturer. Today, Strategy Analytics is breaking down that market share by platform -- and it's clear that Google is still on a roll. Android jumped 10 points year-over-year to reach almost 80 percent of the world smartphone market during the spring quarter, hitting a record high. Some of this rise came at the expense of Apple, which dipped three points, but most of the casualties were in the "others" category led by BlackBerry and Nokia's soon-to-vanish Symbian. Microsoft can claim a small victory, though. Windows Phone climbed slightly to 3.9 percent of the market in Q2, giving it a level of influence not seen in three years. While we're not necessarily looking at the new status quo for the smartphone industry, it's clear that the days of neck and neck competition are behind us.

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Source: Strategy Analytics

Nintendo reports quarterly revenue down, only 160,000 Wii U consoles sold

Nintendo reports quarterly revenue down, 160,000 Wii U consoles sold

Nintendo has just revealed its consolidated results for the April-June quarter, and they show a significant 3.8 percent decline in sales compared to the same quarter last year -- despite (or perhaps because of) the release of the semi-next-gen Wii U. This console sold just 160,000 units during the quarter, or less than half the number of units shifted between January and March. The company's original sales projections for the device, and its hope of selling nine million units by March 2014, are now a distant dream -- we're looking at a lifetime total of just 3.61 million sales. On a more positive note, however, it still managed to sell a million Wii U games, and 1.4 million 3DS handhelds. In addition, the year-over-year fall in revenue was much smaller than the one Nintendo suffered in Q2 2012, and its operating loss was much smaller too -- just under five billion yen in the red. Factoring in all the company's various sources of income, it managed to eke out a net profit of 8.6 billion yen, or $88 million, so there's some life in this playful old outfit yet.

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Source: Nintendo (PDF download)

HTC: the One is selling better than last year’s hero products, but next quarter may see a loss

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HTC's unaudited results for Q2 2013 showed a sign of hope, but in today's call for the Q3 guidance, the Taiwanese company expects next quarter's revenue to be in the range of $1.67 billion to $2 billion, with an operating profit of anything from $0 down to... well, a margin of -minus 8 percent, which would equate to a horrible loss. This is also a notable drop from last year's $2.4 billion revenue and $168 million operating profit.

CEO Peter Chou blames this decline on the higher cost structure (bill of materials and operating costs) and the clearance of aged inventory in the channel, but he hopes that Q3 will be the bottom in terms of HTC's profitability. CFO Chialin Chang added that his team has a few actions in place to help restore the company to profitability very soon.

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Amazon hit by surprise loss last quarter, despite 22 percent rise in sales

Amazon reports surprise loss in in Q2 2013, despite a 22 percent rise in sales

The retail game is all about scraping a living out of tiny margins, and nowhere is that more evident than in Amazon's latest financial report. The company managed to grow revenue by 22 percent year-over-year between April and June, to $15.7 billion, and yet it confounded analysts' predictions by making a loss of $7 million, versus a $7 million profit in the same quarter last year. Then again, this knock has been attributed to the fact that Amazon is pushing to expand beyond the retail game, by investing heavily in its Kindle business, digital downloads and streaming products, as well as in building a bigger presence in China. This has been the strategy for a while, of course, and it's not the first time the company has been pushed into the red as a result. But Jeff Bezos says that Amazon's top ten bestselling products last quarter were all either Kindles, accessories for Kindles, or digital content for Kindles, which suggests the transformation is steadily having an impact, even if it's proving expensive.

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Source: BBC News

Samsung’s Q2 earnings show $6.96 billion net profit, but smartphone growth is slowing

Samsung's Q2 earnings show $696 billion net profit, but smartphone growth is slowing

Samsung has released its audited results for the second quarter, and the company is reporting a net profit of 7.77 trillion won ($6.96 billion.) That's plenty of cash and up from the same period last year, however it warned investors growth momentum in its mobile department may slow in pace. Of course, it's still growing, and sales of its Galaxy S 4 and Galaxy Note 8.0 contributed to a nine percent bump in quarterly revenue for the mobile department. Samsung plans to keep profits high by focusing on "offering differentiated smartphone displays...including flexible display technology" and lowering the cost of its OLED screens. In TVs, profits were also up on more demand for 60-inch+ sets as well as mid-range and low end versions. Samsung is also rolling out Ultra HD and curved OLED TVs in the US, while focusing on more mass-market designs in emerging markets.

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Source: Samsung Q2 2013 results (PDF)

Facebook reports $1.81 billion in revenue for Q2 2013, 1.15 billion monthly active users

Facebook's Q2 2013 earnings

Facebook saw its revenue grow year-over-year in its Q1 earnings reported in May, and that trend has continued for its second quarter. The company has just announced that it's pulled in $1.81 billion in revenue for Q2, beating analysts' expectations, while net income stood at $333 million. Of course, much of that money comes from ads: Facebook says that revenue from advertising now represents 88 percent of its total revenue, and that mobile advertising accounted for about 41 percent of its total advertising revenue for the quarter. Mark Zuckerberg highlighted that last bit in a statement, saying that "the work we've done to make mobile the best Facebook experience is showing good results and provides us with a solid foundation for the future."

In other numbers, Facebook also reported that it has 1.15 billion monthly active users as of June 30th, while its daily active users stood at 669 million. Mobile users were again its biggest growth area, with 819 million users actively checking in on their mobile devices each month (up 51 percent compared to the same quarter in 2012), and 469 million active on a daily basis. We'll keep you posted on any additional developments that may come out of the company's earnings call in the next hour.

Update: Zuckerberg and co. didn't have much additional news to offer during the earning's call, although he did comment briefly on Facebook Home, which he described as a "seed we're planting," and something to look at over the long term.

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Source: Facebook

ARM sees more double-digit growth in Q2 2013, takes big hit from patent litigation

ARM sees doubledigit growth in Q2 2012, profit up 30 percent

This UK chip designer is accustomed to steep growth in demand for its Cortex mobile processors, and although we've seen hints that it faces new challenges ahead, for now it's mostly all gravy. Revenue in Q2 2013 soared 26 percent year-over-year to £171.2 million ($264.3 million), while profit before tax was up 30 percent £86.6 million (in "normalised" terms). Mobile devices remain the largest market for the company, but embedded devices (including wearables, Raspberry Pi and printers) is the fastest growing segment, expanding by 25 percent in the last year. The future continues to look rosy for ARM, with new Samsung Exynos 5 chipsets arriving based on ARM's Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 cores in big.LITTLE configurations.

The only hint of negativity in the earnings report was a huge expense of £41.8 million incurred by a patent attack from an unnamed "third party", which was probably MIPS (see More Coverage), and which contributed to a much lower IFRS profit of £15 million -- although this represents ARM's contribution to a "full and final settlement", which presumably means it's a one-off thing.

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Source: ARM

Google rakes in over $14 billion in revenue during Q2, increased ad revenue balances growing Moto losses

Google rakes in over $14 billion in revenue during Q2, growing ad revenue balances growing Moto losses

For the last several months Google's stock price has been surging, getting increasingly close to the $1,000 mark. And when monstrous revenues like this keep rolling in, it's easy to see why. In Q2 of 2013, the internet giant pulled in $14.11 billion in revenue, an increase of 19 percent year-over-year. Of that massive haul, all most all of it (93 percent) was generated directly by Google properties, most notably massive advertising networks -- $12.1 billion of its gross was thanks to advertising. Motorola's efforts equate to just less than $1 billion in revenues, but the $998 million it pulled in is not an inconsequential improvement over Q2 2012's $843 million. Even with that modest increase, however, Moto still posted an operating loss of $342 million. That's notably worse than the $199 million lost during the same quarter last year. While this wasn't a record setting quarter for Google, it's certainly not far off from its Q4 2012 mark of $14.46 billion, and marks a small increase sequentially.

Net income also remained strong, with the Mountain View team pocketing $3.23 billion. Again, not a record high, but not far off from the $3.55 billion in Q1, and a pretty impressive jump year-over-year from $2.79 billion. While a significant chunk of Google's cash is generated here in the good ol' US of A, the international markets are still treating the company quite well. In fact, a full 55 percent of revenues ($7.2 billion) were earned overseas. While cost-per-click continued to decline for the company, by 6 percent from last year, the number of paid clicks was up more than enough to compensate -- an impressive 23 percent. And, should Google's fortunes suddenly turn, it has a war chest of $54.4 billion stashed away for a rainy day.

We're listening in to the earnings call at 4:30 PM ET today and you'll find updates from that after the break.

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Source: Google

Verizon smartphone revenue up in Q2 2013, half of all 7.5 million activations were iPhones (updated)

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Verizon's latest quarterly report reveals a carrier chugging along nicely, thank you very much. Total revenue (including wireless and wireline) is up slightly to $29.8 billion, while wireless service revenue on its own grew by 8.3 percent compared to the same quarter last year. Nearly a million (941,000) new retail postpaid customers joined the VZW brigade, some of whom may have been drawn to the carrier's expanding LTE service, which is now available to 301 million Americans, as well as to new handsets like the Nokia Lumia 928 and possibly even the BlackBerry Q10 (or maybe not). In any case, those high-margin subscribers helped to increase profit by 14 percent -- so long as you're the kind of person who's content to be guided by "non-GAAP consolidated adjusted earnings per share." There's also no sign of the pension-related issues that affected the company last quarter, which leaves this carrier high and dry, regardless of how smartphone saturation may be affecting others along the food chain.

Update: In its earnings call, Verizon added that 59 percent of traffic on its network is on 4G LTE, and 52 percent of its smartphone activations (around 3.8 million device activations) were iPhones.

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Via: CNBC

Source: Verizon (PDF download)

Nokia reports smaller $150 million loss in Q2 2013, Lumia sales up to 7.4 million

STUB Nokia reports smaller loss in Q2 2013, Lumia sales up to TKTK

After BlackBerry's disastrous earnings a couple of weeks back, Nokia and Microsoft have clear bragging rights over third place in the ecosystem war -- but does a bronze medal earn you any cash? The Finnish manufacturer has reported declining Q2 2013 revenues of €5.69 billion ($7.4 billion) compared to the $9.2 billion earned in the same quarter last year. The good news is that the huge financial losses of 2012 seem to be gone, with today's reported loss standing at just €115 million ($150 million), all of which can be laid at the feet of Nokia's devices and services division.

Meanwhile, the company's smartphone sales seem to be growing thanks to fresh Lumia models like the 520, 620 and 720 -- with a total of 7.4 million Windows Phone 8 devices sold in the quarter. For context, that's significantly more than the 6.8 million units BlackBerry could boast in its latest report. It's also a big improvement on the 5.6 million in Lumia sales from Q1 and the 4.4 million sold in Q4 2012. However, the Asha division saw sales slip down from 5 million last quarter to 4.3 million now. Oh, and if anyone's still in the market for a Symbian handset, better be quick -- the company is reporting that sales of the phones are now "approximately zero."

In other parts of the business, "Here," Nokia's renamed mapping division, lost €89 million ($116 million) while Nokia Siemens Networks made a slender €8 million ($10.4 million) profit. Looking forward, the company has said that it's lowering its future estimates by two percent, saying that dwindling demand, higher operating expenses and "the macroeconomic environment" will all help to erode the company's cash reserves. But hey, at least Microsoft's still kicking in that $250 million in alimony platform support payments.

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Source: Nokia (.PDF)