Costs in line with sales allow HTC to survive HTC reported its first YoY growth in 4 years but the figures show that it is still only just hanging on by the skin of its teeth. Q4 14A Revenues / EBIT were NT$47.9bn / NT$180m (US$1,500m / US$6m) compared to consensus at NT$45bn / LOSS...
Samsung Smart Home will live or die in software. Samsung headlined day 1 at CES but its press conference was pretty subdued with a distinct lack of new and exciting ideas. Instead what was presented was an evolution of its current line-up of Televisions now to be using phosphor-based LED dots (Quantum Dots) as backlights....
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....
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...
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.
Samsung Q4 14A – Breathing Space
Some relief as handsets did not worsen materially. Samsung reported Q4 14A preliminary results that beat expectations but were not enough to lead me to believe that the worst is over. Q4 14E revenues / EBIT were KRW51tn-KRW53tn / KRW5.0-KRW5.4tn compared to consensus at KRW52.2tn / KRW4.8tn. RFM was more conservative on the revenue outlook...