CellPhoneBurn

Bad news for the mobile phone market in 2008, 2009, and beyond

Ouch: Nokia reported Friday that fourth quarter industry mobile phone sales would be far lower than expected - 20 million phones lower, to be exact. The company also painted a pretty bleak picture for the future, thanks to a certain global recession.

Nokia didn’t give any hard numbers for 2009, other than to say that phone sales would be lower than 2008, as would be anything to do with the Nokia Siemens Networks joint venture (surprise!).

Mobile Millenium: Conducting Real-Life Traffic Experiments on You

*with participation.

Sometime in February, Nokia and the University of California at Berkeley conducted a real-world traffic experiment using cars outfitted with Nokia N95s to see if GPS-enabled mobile phones could gather location data and pinpoint trafficky areas.

A recent post by Jill at SquareTrade got me thinking about something I usually don’t: cell phone protection plans. I’ve never considered these plans and I’m pretty sure I never will. But I tend to baby my cell phone. And most people don’t…

Each of the Big Four phone carriers has some sort of cell phone insurance plan. Basically, you pay a set fee each month, and a deductible when the unthinkable happens. You then get a new/refurb phone, and everyone’s happy, right? Not necessarily, if you look at your actual cost for the replacement.

What with all the recession talk and lackluster earnings from phone makers, it wasn’t much of a surprise to hear that third quarter cell phone shipments fell 0.4% from the previous quarter (Q2), and gained a mere 3.2% compared to last year. But what was interesting, was the new rankings for global market share.

(in order from largest market share to smallest)

Nokia - 39.4%
Samsung - 17.3%
Sony Ericsson - 8.6%
Motorola - 8.5%
LG Electronics - 7.7%

What would a future filled with NFC (Near-Field Communication) technology look like? The MIT Mobile Experience Lab attempted to answer this question with a short video and white paper. Video after the jump.

The long and drawn-out war between two wireless giants has finally reached an end. Nokia and Qualcomm both agreed to drop all legal proceedings against each other, and sign a new licensing agreement that has Nokia paying a hefty sum for Qualcomm’s patents.

It’s hard to say how much of the agreement is set in stone, however: a spokesperson for Nokia said the company would be paying out $2.28 billion dollars, while Qualcomm’s spokesperson claimed $2.5 billion dollars. Uh-oh. Is that another legal battle on the horizon?

In return for the upfront payment and subsequent royalties, Nokia will get access to a number of Qualcomm’s patents for a period of 15 years.

SE's Q3 might've been even more lackluster without the C902.

Nokia’s 30% drop in profits doesn’t seem so bad compared to the woes still plaguing Sony Ericsson: the partnership reported a loss of 25 million euros, compared to a profit of 267 million euros last year, on sales of 25.7 million handsets.

The reasons for lower sales/profit were pretty much the same as Nokia - worse exchange rates and higher sales of lower-margin phones.

SE’s average selling price fell to 109 euros, down from 120 euros a year ago, and 116 euros in the second quarter. Market share stayed the same, at 8%.

Nokia Gets Hit Hard in Q3

Sometime in September, Nokia announced that market share would fall in the third quarter, causing a virtual stock landslide (-11%). Well, the results are in, and yes, market share did fall, along with almost every other metric in the book. But Nokia stock still ended on a high note - some 9.6% higher than the previous day’s close.

The highlights:

Sprint: Winning the Wrong Awards

Executive compensation is always a fun topic, and it turns out the latest chapter in the book of overpaid execs comes from Sprint Nextel, who just beat out 500 companies to win the award for Worst Pay-For-Performance.

The study basically compared the top five executives’ salaries, bonuses, and sign-on/severance packages to the company’s performance in 2007, which was downright nasty. 2007 was a year that Sprint would probably just like to forget: its stock fell 30 percent, they lost $29 billion dollars, they tried to kick out their whiniest customers which resulted in a particularly ugly PR fiasco, etc. And this was before the credit crunch!

EMI joins Nokia's Comes With Music

The Big Four record companies. That’s Universal, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group, and EMI. And a couple of days ago, EMI became the last of the Big Four to join Nokia’s unlimited music downloading service, Comes With Music.

Interesting statistic: last year the company made a grand total of -260 million pounds (-$452 million USD), and that was WITH names such as Coldplay, Kylie Minogue, The Beatles, Iron Maiden, and - dare I say it - Katy Perry, whose hit single sounds something like this:

I kissed a girl
and I liked it.

Nokia 6212 classic: powered by NFC

Wow, it’s been a long time, NFC - the last time I wrote about you was almost a year ago. At that time, Nokia was conducting yet another trial experiment in London, where NFC guinea pigs received a Nokia 6131 NFC-enabled phone and 200 GBP spending money - not a bad haul.

Nokia Comes With Music *might* be adding a cool $150 bucks to phone prices.

So, there was this question of how Nokia was planning on financing its Comes With Music “free” unlimited music download service. Would they simply try to push the customer into forking over an unspecified amount of moolah once the one-year subscription ended?

A recent article in Forbes highlights new software that puts your integrated GPS to good use with some cool location-based services. There’s pickings from Google (based on the the up and coming Android operating system), Apple, and of course Nokia.

Investor reaction to Nokia's market share woes.

It’s never a good thing when a company issues a press release for the sole purpose of dropping some bad news on the table. Today’s epic fail press release comes direct from Nokia, with this not-so-upbeat announcement:

“Nokia now expects its mobile device market share in the third quarter 2008 to be lower than in the second quarter 2008.”

And boy, what an impact. Shares of Nokia dropped almost 11% on the news.

Nokia cited three reasons for the market share decrease:

After a series of losses in the past year or so, Motorola has been pretty much down for the count as of late. But surprises do happen, and this week's surprise announcement was as follows:

Motorola: Made $4 million in Q2 and lovin' it.

Motorola actually made money. Okay, so $4 million dollars isn't a whole lot of profit. But considering Wall Street analysts were expecting losses of over $30 mil, I'd say that's quite the surprise. Unfortunately, the company's still not out of the hole, and its cell phone business wasn't exactly churning out hits in Q2 (actually, the division managed to lose $346 million).