Radio Free Mobile is going off the air for the season but will return on January 5th. RFM would like to wish all its subscribers and readers its best wishes for the season and a happy new year.
LINE expands its offering to keep revenues growing. LINE has agreed to buy Microsoft’s free personal music streaming business, MixRadio in an attempt to expand its offering and keep growth going. LINE is very far from being the biggest instant messaging with around 250m monthly active users but historically, it has been one of the...
Huawei offers very little threat to Xiaomi. Despite slipping to number 5 in the Chinese smartphone market, Huawei has ambitions to return to its former glory. It aims to accomplish this pushing launching its new Honor brand and emulating Xiaomi in every respect except the most important. The Honor brand is aimed at younger Chinese...
A great payments service is not enough to stem the tide. While Apple continues to expand the reach of Apple Pay, Samsung is looking to save its bacon with a competing offering. This would bring Samsung into direct competition with Google Wallet and it is unclear how this relates to the non-compete agreement that the...
Xiaomi disclosures push valuation even lower. A disclosure to the Shenzhen stock exchange has revealed the reality of Xiaomi’s financial performance in 2013A. Xiaomi owns stake in Midea group and it was within this company’s disclosure to the stock exchange that the details were to be found. The key disclosure is that in...
Facebook shows the critical nature of optimised experiences. Facebook’s decision to remove Bing is very unlikely to be a sign that there is a new entrant coming to the search market. Facebook recently updated the Graph search tool that helps users find old posts and content from friends and has removed external search results that...
Sony’s advantage already looks to be at risk. Microsoft’s efforts to make up for the disastrous launch of the Xbox One are finally bearing fruit as the Xbox One outsold the PS4 in November. The Xbox One and PS4 are very similar with the PS4 having a slight edge over the Xbox One when it...
Patent royalties will pressure margins further. Xiaomi has hit a road block in India as some of its products have been hit with a preliminary injunction following a complaint from Ericsson for infringement of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs). India is Xiaomi’s first major foray outside of its home market in China and this is likely...
A third way to monetise may be about to emerge. Microsoft’s pricing scheme for Windows 10 has yet to be released but it looks like it will have to rely on a new way to monetise if it is to make money from the smaller sized screen segment. There are three ways to make money...
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.
RFM 2015E – Top 5
The PC market is likely to offer the biggest surprise in 2015E Wearables The technology industry is likely to continue scratching its head over what to do with wearables. It is a segment where there is a clear opportunity but nobody seems to have any idea what the real use case for these devices is....