Announcing its second quarter results yesterday, Motorola posted all time high mobile device sales this quarter, including record operating earnings from devices.

The company’s sales increased 46% to $7,140 million while its operating earnings rose 62 per cent to $799 million.

Motorola has retained its second position in India and world wide, while expanding its global market share to 22% in the second quarter this year. The company also expanded its market share to more than 20% in China, up 8.9 percentage points from the year-ago quarter.

Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, said second-quarter profit gained 43% while net income rose to $1.44 billion. Sales rose 22% to $12.24 billion from $10.1 billion.

Analysts are of the opinion that handset sales in China and India were likely to have boosted the companies’ earnings.

While Motorola’s earnings have beat estimates, those of Nokia are largely seen as reflecting stagnant growth in the industry. Bloomberg article has more details.

2:20:02 PM    comment   

Financial Express has a good article which discusses issues around allotment of 3G spectrum and aspects of its pricing. It also delves into the India specific issues.

The key issue facing the regulator is the appropriateness of the policy on 3G services with respect to identification of the appropriate band, criteria for allocating spectrum and pricing mechanism considering the spectrum scarcity in the country. Traditionally three methodologies have been used for licensing in the other countries: Auction, Free licenses, Beauty contest.

1:33:37 PM    comment   

Things are getting a bit dicey in the MVNO Land. Helio is costing Earthlink some profits. Amp’d is d’amp’d. And now reports that Mobile ESPN is finding that attracting sports fans to use their service is not easy. Walt Disney owned service will have 30,000 users by end of 2006, lagging the 240,000-user target for the current year.

Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst Jessica Reif Cohen says it will cost the company as much as $135 million, and they should shut it down. (I wonder if she has taken into account the airtime being devoted to the service on ESPN, instead of taking paid ads. )

Rafat thinks they should tweak the model, but not shut it down this early in the game. I think getting cooler phones should be a start. I had stopped by at Best Buy to check out the service, but there was not a single handset that would make me sign up for the service.

1:33:00 PM    comment