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Motorola Rises After Saying It May Drop Mobile Phones

Feb. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Motorola Inc., which has lost mobile- phone market share to all of its major rivals, rose the most in almost four years in New York trading after saying it may bow to shareholder pressure and shed its money-losing handset unit.
Chief Executive Officer Greg Brown said yesterday that the Schaumburg, Illinois-based company is exploring its options, including a possible separation of its mobile-devices business.
The announcement pleased investors including billionaire Carl Icahn, who have demanded that the company dispose of the unit. The business, which accounts for about half of Motorola's revenue, lost $388 million last quarter as customers defected to phones from Samsung Electronics Co. and Apple Inc.
``Enough people, from Carl Icahn to many others, have suggested that this is the best thing for Motorola to do,'' said Mark Mowrey, a Laguna Beach, California-based analyst at Al Frank Asset Management, which owns Motorola shares. ``I hope it's not a reaction from the executive side to a lot of the near-term sentiment the company is hearing from investors.''
Motorola jumped $1.11, or 9.7 percent, to $12.61 at 3:31 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading, the most since April 2004, after rising 13 percent to $12.97 earlier. The stock had fallen 42 percent in the past year before today.
Citigroup Inc. upgraded the shares to ``buy'' from ``hold'' after the announcement.
Motorola's phone shipments plunged 38 percent last quarter after it lost customers to Apple's iPhone and camera phones from Samsung. That brought Motorola closer to losing its spot as the third-largest handset maker in the world.
Icahn's Plan
MOre
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601213&sid=aEcnAL7NbrpQ&refer=home

think pretty much the same thing happend when the swedish ericsson
when they sold off their mobile part to merge with sony

The iPhone is 26 percent Samsung

So Apple is suing the pants off of Samsung in Europe, in Australia and possibly everywhere else. That’s because it claims that (1) Samsung stole the look and technology of the iPhone for the highly successful Galaxy S II Android phones, and (2) Samsung stole the look and technology of the iPad for the rising tablet stars, the Galaxy Tab 10.1/8.1.
But that doesn’t stop the two from being the best of friends when it comes to other business matters.
Utilizing data from “teardown” research firm iSuppli, The Economist reports that the iPhone 4 is 26 percent Samsung. At least in terms of components. According to iSuppli’s reverse engineering data, Samsung supplies three key components for the iPhone 4: the flash memory ($26), DRAM memory ($11.60), and the applications processor ($8.08).
Apple doesn’t do any of its manufacturing, leaving the dirty work to its Asian partners. Manufacturers in fact earn just a pittance compared to what Apple earns, which is an estimated $368 per phone (!). Apparently, that money is tribute money for Apple’s design, marketing and engineering prowess.
So despite the lawsuits and legal wranglings, Apple needs Samsung, and vice versa.
The question now is who needs who even more?
Because the iPhone has captured over 19 percent of the global market, Apple is a lucrative partner for Samsung. On the other hand, few companies can deliver quality components in volume the way Samsung can, so Apple will be hard pressed to find another supplier who can fit the bill the way Samsung does.
Besides, Samsung’s components business unit is separate from its consumer electronics units. So they probably couldn’t care less about what the other is up to… unless the CEO steps in.

You should qualify that with "for now." Once all these chip manufacturers like VIA (via HTC ) and Samsung are done playing with Apple's lawsuit frenzy, I'd fully expect repercussions (especially if it hurts their stock price). Don't expect a board of directors to sit idly by while Apple (their customer) tries to crush their corporate value.

The tech world is pretty incestuous. I bet most tech execs don't actually know where their supplies are coming from half the time.

During WWII The US sold lots of Ford cars to Germany....at the same time when they were fighting on the western front.

$8?!! Cheap!
Sent from my HTC Vision

Mods please delete this thread

MODS PLEASE DELETE THIS THREAD
Just saw this article and thought I would Quote it.
Each person in the suit is seeking 1 million won ($932) in damages, Kim Hyeong-seok, one of their attorneys, said Wednesday. He said they are targeting Apple Inc. and its South Korean unit to "protect privacy" rights.
Apple spokesman Steve Park in Seoul declined to comment.
Apple has faced complaints and criticisms since it said in April that its iPhones were storing locations of nearby cellphone towers and Wi-Fi hot spots for up to a year. Such data can be used to create a rough map of the device owner's movements.
Apple also revealed that a software bug caused iPhones to continue to send anonymous location data to the company's servers even when location services on the device were turned off.
The company has said it will no longer store the data on phones for more than seven days, will encrypt the data and will stop backing up the files to user computers. It also has fixed the bug with a free software update.
Kim, the lawyer, took Apple to court earlier this year over iPhone privacy and was awarded 1 million won.
The Korea Communications Commission, South Korea's communications regulator, earlier this month ordered Apple's local operation to pay a 3 million won fine for what it said were violations of the country's location information laws.
Oh Byoung-cheol, a professor of information technology law at Seoul's Yonsei University law school, said that the KCC ruling is likely to bolster the plaintiffs' allegations of illegality by Apple and that could have an impact on possible cases in other countries.
But any South Korean court decision on damages is unlikely to have much effect elsewhere given differences in international tort law, he said.
South Korean courts "tend to be stingy with damages for mental suffering," he said.
If the court in the southern city of Changwon rules in favor of the plaintiffs, the total award could come to about 27.6 billion won ($25.7 million). Cupertino, California-based Apple — the most valuable company in the United States — earned $7.31 billion in its fiscal third quarter.
Kim said he expected the first hearing in the new case to take place in October or November.
Jung Ogk-taek, an official at the Changwon District Court, said it was not clear how much time would be needed to reach a verdict.
Kim said 26,691 plaintiffs were listed in the civil suit filed Wednesday. Another 921 are minors and lawyers need to obtain the consent of their parents before they can join, Kim said. He expects that to take about two weeks.
Lawyers are soliciting more participants between now and the end of this month to join the case.
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ITC Bans Import of HTC Android

The International Trade Commission (ITC) on Monday ruled in favor of Apple in its patent battle against HTC, ordering an import ban on certain HTC devices starting April 19, 2012.
HTC will be allowed to import refurbished devices with the infringing patent until Dec. 19, 2013 for replacement purposes, but the company cannot refer to new devices as refurbished, the ITC said in its ruling.
HTC and Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As patent blogger Florian Mueller explained in a blog post, the ban applies to Android-based devices that including a "data tapping patent." One example of this technology is a phone number within an email that you can tap to bring up the phone dialer and place a call automatically.
"If Google can implement this popular feature, which users of modern-day smartphones really expect, without infringing on the two patent claims found infringed, this import ban won't have any effect whatsoever," Mueller wrote. "Otherwise HTC will have to remove this feature, which would put HTC at a competitive disadvantage as compared to other smartphone makers, including other Android device makers."
In July, an ITC judge found that HTC infringed on two of 10 Apple patents. HTC and Apple both requested reviews in that decision, prolonging the process.
"Apple would have preferred for the Commission to adopt the [administrative law judge's] recommendation, but in the event that a review would take place (as it did), Apple also wanted to raise some questions of its own and asked for another look at the two patents the ALJ did not deem infringed," Mueller wrote today. "But as I expected, the review focused on the two patents the ALJ deemed infringed."
Mueller noted that the ITC found that HTC does not infringe on a "much broader and potentially more impactful patent on realtime signal processing." That, he said, "could have had much more impact on HTC and, more generally, Android than the data tapping patent."
Nonetheless, the ITC ruling is "progress" for Apple, Mueller said. If Cupertino can challenge handset makers on other data-tapping-esque patents, it could "really have competitive impact with its many litigations targeting Android," Mueller concluded.
In addition to the ITC, Apple and HTC are also battling over patents in several courts throughout the world.
Today's decision was twice-delayed. The D.C-based ITC was first scheduled to rule on Dec. 6, but that got pushed to Dec 14 and then today.
Earlier this month, PCMag mobile analyst Sascha Segan suggested that an Apple win is also a victory for Microsoft. For more, see An HTC Android Ban is Microsoft's Dream.
Today's ruling comes several weeks after the ITC ruled that Apple's products don't infringe on patents held by S3 Graphics, a company in the process of being acquired by HTC.
For more from Chloe, follow her on Twitter @ChloeAlbanesius.

zombie.raised said:
The International Trade Commission (ITC) on Monday ruled in favor of Apple in its patent battle against HTC, ordering an import ban on certain HTC devices starting April 19, 2012.
HTC will be allowed to import refurbished devices with the infringing patent until Dec. 19, 2013 for replacement purposes, but the company cannot refer to new devices as refurbished, the ITC said in its ruling.
HTC and Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As patent blogger Florian Mueller explained in a blog post, the ban applies to Android-based devices that including a "data tapping patent." One example of this technology is a phone number within an email that you can tap to bring up the phone dialer and place a call automatically.
"If Google can implement this popular feature, which users of modern-day smartphones really expect, without infringing on the two patent claims found infringed, this import ban won't have any effect whatsoever," Mueller wrote. "Otherwise HTC will have to remove this feature, which would put HTC at a competitive disadvantage as compared to other smartphone makers, including other Android device makers."
In July, an ITC judge found that HTC infringed on two of 10 Apple patents. HTC and Apple both requested reviews in that decision, prolonging the process.
"Apple would have preferred for the Commission to adopt the [administrative law judge's] recommendation, but in the event that a review would take place (as it did), Apple also wanted to raise some questions of its own and asked for another look at the two patents the ALJ did not deem infringed," Mueller wrote today. "But as I expected, the review focused on the two patents the ALJ deemed infringed."
Mueller noted that the ITC found that HTC does not infringe on a "much broader and potentially more impactful patent on realtime signal processing." That, he said, "could have had much more impact on HTC and, more generally, Android than the data tapping patent."
Nonetheless, the ITC ruling is "progress" for Apple, Mueller said. If Cupertino can challenge handset makers on other data-tapping-esque patents, it could "really have competitive impact with its many litigations targeting Android," Mueller concluded.
In addition to the ITC, Apple and HTC are also battling over patents in several courts throughout the world.
Today's decision was twice-delayed. The D.C-based ITC was first scheduled to rule on Dec. 6, but that got pushed to Dec 14 and then today.
Earlier this month, PCMag mobile analyst Sascha Segan suggested that an Apple win is also a victory for Microsoft. For more, see An HTC Android Ban is Microsoft's Dream.
Today's ruling comes several weeks after the ITC ruled that Apple's products don't infringe on patents held by S3 Graphics, a company in the process of being acquired by HTC.
For more from Chloe, follow her on Twitter @ChloeAlbanesius.
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That might be enough to get me to import my future phones from here on out.
Or leave the USA.
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Hate apple
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I got my EVO 3D from rogers Canada and works perfectly on att. Have my vivid on the backburner til it gets unlocked.
I have no objections to going overseas to get the phones I want
Sent from my HTC EVO 3D X515m using xda premium

Well, that's Apple for you. Make a few innovations, and then sue everyone that makes it better than you.
And I used to be an iPhone guy, but their products are stale and boring now, and without Steve Jobs they're lost. God forbid they try to think up something ACTUALLY NEW again.

This particular patent sounds some what easy to work around, or its not a big deal if HTC drop this feature from the mail client.
I am not sure if they would go after if HTC made this as APP , I am sure touchdown and many other apps also violate this.I think the best option here would be to open source HTC sense code.
It would great for xda dev and HTC too....

HTC Planning Work-Around
In this post on ZDNet, HTC indicates they are planning a work-around. That makes me think that this will drive efforts to get an upgrade out soon(er). The question is whether it will be separate or include ICS. The trick will be to get AT&T to get their act together and deploy it in a timely manner
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-sour...ndroid-phones-sales-for-now/10032?tag=nl.e539

In Canada Bell kind of leaked the information that Raider (VIVID) will get ICS in 1st week of March 2012. Its quite possible to see a Beta version leak in early 2012.
its good to see the service provider pushing for for an update with a schedule, At least will Bell Canada it was never this way before.

"Samsung Galaxy S5 Comes Early, And With A Hint Of Desperation"

I found this to be a very interesting read so I thought I'd share it.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/haydnsh...5-comes-early-and-with-a-hint-of-desperation/
Samsung has announced a preview of the Galaxy S5 on February 24th at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Sort of. Invites have gone out to the press for what Samsung is describing as Unpacked, Episode 1 with a large 5 emblazoned on the invite (twice). All a big tease. Might it backfire?
The announcement has been picked up around the world. A Galaxy launch is a big event. But there is a hint that this time round Samsung is desperate to get a new device out there and to use the attendant publicity to drive sales in a very tight market. Samsung needs this more than we do.
In the middle of last year, not long after the S4 launch I suggested Samsung had peaked in smartphones. The evidence since then has been pretty compelling. Samsung’s sales seem to have stalled more dramatically than Apple’s.
In June 2013 Samsung gave guidance on record profits. By Q4 Bloomberg reported the first drop in profits in 9 quarters.
Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) posted its first profit decline in nine quarters as new Apple Inc. (AAPL) iPhones won over high-end handset buyers and models from cheaper Chinese producers lured budget customers.
It’s clear that the Samsung pricing cascade is running out of steam. You have to go back some years, to the general consumer electronics industry and in particular TVs to see this cascade at work. Remember it?
Launch at a high price/high margin to soak the early adopters, discount to acquire market share; and when that stops working, launch a new generation product. Soon after the S4 was available the price differential in different parts of the world exceeded $300 as they played this cascade out in different markets.
Now Samsung needs sales, not least to support its vast manufacturing capacity. According to Daewo Securities, “Samsung shipped 13 million units of its S4 in the fourth quarter, down from 17 million in the previous three months.” That’s a reduction of 4 million units in the buying season.
Because of its pricing model, Samsung is also in danger of ceding high margin sales to Apple more generally.
There will be novelty in the S5 to try to win margins back, however. Leaks in January suggest Samsung will sport a new UI in the S5, possible powered by Google NOW. The two companies have been working more closely lately and more product integration would be no surprise. Samsung has also been working hard on its branding, despite being caught out manipulating social media reviews of competitors. I covered some of that brand investment here on Forbes.
Yet it is in software and services integration that Samsung still lags. Software has been named a new national priority for Korea, a move reported by The New Yorker, recently. In the software and services arena, in promoting service revenue in place of hardware margins, Samsung is a decade behind Apple. The strain of being hardware first is beginning to tell.
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Samsung's suffering the same thing Apple is - Western smartphone markets are approaching saturation which is causing a drop in margins as manufacturers turn to emerging markets where selling price and margin are lower. In quarterly revenue, market share, and margin growth Samsung still outperformed all other Android device manufacturers based on last quarter's earnings. Their revenue was actually up but their earning's were depressed because of lower margins in mobile devices. LG (who gets over half their mobile revenue from dumb phones) and the other Chinese (physically based and selling market) manufacturers showed YOY gains but everyone else is dying including Sony, HTC, and Motorola.
So if articles like you quoted predicting Samsung's death and desperation are true I hope you like Apple and iOS. Because if changing market conditions are going to kill Samsung then they'll be the last to go behind every other brand discussed on XDA.

BarryH_GEG said:
Samsung's suffering the same thing Apple is - Western smartphone markets are approaching saturation which is causing a drop in margins as manufacturers turn to emerging markets where selling price and margin are lower. In quarterly revenue, market share, and margin growth Samsung still outperformed all other Android device manufacturers based on last quarter's earnings. Their revenue was actually up but their earning's were depressed because of lower margins in mobile devices. LG (who gets over half their mobile revenue from dumb phones) and the other Chinese (physically based and selling market) manufacturers showed YOY gains but everyone else is dying including Sony, HTC, and Motorola.
So if articles like you quoted predicting Samsung's death and desperation are true I hope you like Apple and iOS. Because if changing market conditions are going to kill Samsung then they'll be the last to go behind every other brand discussed on XDA.
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Quite an intelligent response. I didn't perceive the article as pointing towards the death of Samsung. Samsung obviously isn't going anywhere anytime soon. I'd rather be without a phone than having an Apple product.

Delakit said:
Quite an intelligent response. I didn't perceive the article as pointing towards the death of Samsung. Samsung obviously isn't going anywhere anytime soon. I'd rather be without a phone than having an Apple product.
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The is the problem you going to get In an ecosystem with so many competition. Every manufacturer costs raise to compete with each other and in the end becomes a zero sum game for them. Just like sony needing to exit their PC biz, some manufacturers who can't play well in smartphone world will need to exit too.
Only winner here is Google and in some way Apple owning their own ecosystems, Consumers definitely benefit the most with the amount of choices of phones out there to tinker with

Phones are overpriced anyway. I've never seen the actual costs but it's silly.
I think if anyone's in danger Apple are in trouble. They are still overpricing. I know quite a few who have jumped ship from Apple.
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Samsung is being force to compete now, the likes of LG has making them a little bit more competitive, which is a good thing since before Samsung was the Android king and the King of smart phone besting out Apple and Window phones. Since the LG G2 was introduce, Samsung customer have been looking toward LG direction, I am one of them and I am glad I picked the G2 over the S4. Let the two giant battle it out, the winner will be the customer.