No one can miss the dark clouds streaming overhead, but analysts say that without the expected growth in smartphone sales, those clouds might blot out the sun altogether. Handset sales, of course, drive chip sales, and most analysts have been revising their forecasts downward...
The following list includes ratings changes and financial information for wireless companies announced this week by investment-banking and financial-services firms.Carriers--Standard & Poor's Ratings Services assigned its 'B" rating to MetroPCS Wireless Inc.'s proposed $300 million senior notes due 2014. The firm also affirmed its...
TO OBSERVERS, MOTOROLA INC.'S GLASS is either half-full or half-empty. "Ringing Start for Motorola Chief," declared Barron's last week after the ailing American vendor reported steep losses.Barron's had chosen to hail the straight talk and frank acknowledgements by the company's new co-CEO, Sanjay Jha,...
Motorola Inc. lost $397 million on $7.5 billion in revenue across all its businesses in the third quarter and said today it would delay its plan to spinoff its handset division until sometime after 2009.And in a move to cut costs, the company said...
A study from ABI Research predicts the market for femtocell semiconductors could top $1.8 billion 2013, from $72 million this year, growing at an annual compound growth rate of more than 300%.The lucrative market is attracting more and more silicon vendors, including heavyweights Freescale...
Even as Motorola Inc. makes some key new hires, such as co-CEO Sanjay Jha, other executives continue to exit.Chief Information Officer Patty Morrison left the company last week. Morrison joined Motorola in 2005, during former CEO Edward Zander's tenure, from Office Depot Inc. She...
The LiMo Foundation announced nine new members today and said that more handsets with its operating system are launching in North America and Japan. The organization is a leading proponent of an open-source, Linux OS for handsets, and said that its latest members represented...
Samsung has diversified its suppliers of UMTS baseband chips to include Infineon Technologies AG, leaving the world's second-largest handset vendor less dependent on Qualcomm Inc., Samsung confirmed."This is no surprise," said Will Strauss, principal at Forward Concepts, which tracks the mobile chip market. "Samsung...
Mobile phone design efforts over the past two years appear to have taken the handset as far as it will go, for now, if the handsets coming out of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, are any indication.The forefront of innovation today is...
Separate mobile Linux efforts have been cited by competitors as likely to lead to fragmentation.That's an ongoing debate, to be sure. But one Linux camp and an analyst said last week that "fragmentation" definitely means fragmenting the pool of application developers available to any...
The following list includes ratings changes and financial information for wireless companies announced this week by investment-banking and financial-services firms.Carrier --Lehman Brothers lowered its rating on Leap Wireless to equal weight from overweight and cut its price target on the company to $43 from...
Intel Corp. has a vision for portable, personal broadband that will ensure the company transitions from "Intel Inside" to "Intel on the Internet."Mobile WiMAX plays a big role in chip vendor's vision, according to Intel's Ron Peck. Intel is prepared to turn out WiMAX...
Motorola Inc. is shifting its long-term, 3G-chip business away from Qualcomm Inc. in favor of Texas Instruments Inc., leading one analyst last week to downgrade his short-term rating on Qualcomm from "buy" to "neutral."A Motorola spokeswoman confirmed that the company would use Qualcomm "opportunistically"...
Motorola Inc. has shifted its 3G chip business away from Qualcomm Inc. in favor of Texas Instruments Inc. and Freescale Inc., according to analyst Mark McKechnie. "We believe Motorola's decision was purely business," McKechnie wrote in a note to investors yesterday. "Our checks reveal...
The W-CDMA baseband chip business is morphing in real time, as various market pressures push and pull the players to partner, diversify their customer base or pursue less-demanding technologies.Data from Forward Concepts (see chart) shows that last year Texas Instruments Inc. was the global...
When teardown firms managed to analyze the components of the iPhone, they found that Apple Inc. had taken the wireless handset industry's diversification strategy one step further.Where most handset vendors rely on one main source for certain key components-while cueing up a second source...
Corporate infrastructure provider Avaya Inc. announced an $8.2 billion deal under which it will be bought out by two private-equity firms. The transaction is just the latest in a growing line of private-equity buyouts in the telecom industry.Under the terms of the agreement, Silver...
Alltel Corp. announced Sunday that it agreed to be acquired by two private-equity firms in a $27.5 billion transaction.The buyers are TPG Capital, the global buyout group of private-investment firm TPG (formerly Texas Pacific Group), and GS Capital Partners, the private-equity vehicle of The...
The rise of venture capitalists' power in the wireless industry and beyond continues to grow with the just announced purchase of National Grid Wireless U.S. by M/C Venture Partners and Wachovia Capital Partners. Terms of the sale by National Grid plc, the fourth-largest publicly...
ONCE UPON A TIME, in the deep past-about six months ago, say-the global handset business started looking fairly predictable. Nokia Corp. had steadily amassed dominant market share while maintaining relatively steady if sometimes unspectacular revenue and profits. Motorola Inc. made giddy strides in pursuit...
Qualcomm Inc.'s prospects for quarterly revenue and earnings due in April have brightened, while Texas Instruments Inc.'s forecast lacked luster. Although both companies' forecasts pertain to the current quarter only, analysts said the outlook for the rest of the year may look somewhat similar...
The next couple of quarters will be rocky, Motorola Inc.'s CFO told investors and analysts at last week's Bank of America's 2007 Technology Conference in New York. David Devonshire, Motorola's CFO, used the term three times until an unidentified analyst asked him to clarify...
The next few quarters will be "rocky," Motorola Inc.'s chief financial officer told investors and analysts at Bank of America's 2007 Technology Conference-a term the executive used three times until an analyst asked him to clarify it. Did "rocky" mean no margins or negative...
Texas Instruments Inc., established in 1930 to develop oil exploration technology, has grown into a predominantly wireless-based powerhouse with $14.3 billion in annual revenue last year. Its main customer for its digital signal processors is Nokia Corp., the world's largest cellphone vendor. By revenue,...
