Reply to this post The real action in the mobile industry is no longer in Barcelona. With 90,000 attendees, MWC 2015 is bigger than ever but all through the bustle and the endless halls something is missing. Not only are the companies who make all the money in the mobile industry conspicuously absent, but no...
Reply to this post Hardware alone cannot restore lost margins. Samsung’s launch of the Galaxy s6 and s6 Edge clearly demonstrated how little is left for Samsung to play with now that Google has taken the whole ecosystem. Samsung launched the Galaxy s6 and a double edged variant at a large but somewhat subdued event...
Reply to this post Apple in a weak position in its fight against Ericsson. Following the expiration of their licence deal in January 2015, Apple and Ericsson are heading to court to fight over the licensing of standard essential IP that relates to 3G and 4G. Ericsson has filed 7 complaints in the US claiming...
Reply to this post YouTube contributes no profit but a lot of value to Google. Even though YouTube managed to earn around $4bn in revenues in 2014A, the inherent nature of video economics continue to prevent it from turning a real profit in its own right. I suspect that the main reason for this is...
Reply to this post Mobile payments could cause the gorillas to start fighting again. Google’s acquisition of technology from Softcard threatens to shatter the fragile peace that has existed between Samsung and Google since January 2014. For more details please see Samsung & Google – Gorilla War – 27th May 2014 Following the failure of...
Reply to this post Yahoo! still fails to address the central issue of its ecosystem. Yahoo! hosted its first mobile developer conference last week that barely created a ripple in the newsflow. This was because it was devoid of anything really new other than the launch of mobile developer suite that looks a lot like...
Reply to this post Lollipop in danger of sucking. Despite promises of significant performance improvements, initial testing is showing that Lollipop is not much better than KitKat. This will rub salt into the wound caused by the upgrade that has been sitting on the shelf for months and is still not in the market in...
Reply to this post LoopPay must become seamless to create value for Samsung. With the complete cessation of any attempts at the ecosystem (see here), the acquisition of unique hardware is the only way left for Samsung to differentiate. To this end Samsung has announced the acquisition of LoopPay which is an enabler of wireless...
Reply to this post Sony’s strategy raises more concerns that it solves. Sony has announced its medium term strategy with the aim of delivering JPY500bn in operating profit for the full year ending March 2017E. This would represent a return on equity (RoE) of 10% which will be the yardstick against which performance will be...
Richard is founder, owner of research company, Radio Free Mobile. He has 16 years of experience working in sell side equity research. During his 11 year tenure at Nomura Securities, he focused on the equity coverage of the Global Technology sector.
MWC 15 – Day 2 – Different strokes
Reply to this post Both MediaTek and Jolla raise eyebrows at MWC 2015. MediaTek It seems like MediaTek has been around for ages but it is a very different company now than it was even 12 months ago. Most people think of it as the cheap and cheerful vendor of vast volumes of low end...