earnings

Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC reported unaudited third quarter earnings. The numbers don’t disappoint and follow their equally successful June quarter sales trends when the company doubled profits on sales of 12.1 million smartphones. For the three-month period, HTC’s profits and revenues almost doubled year over year, buoyed on their extensive lineup of the recently released Android handsets.

Unaudited net profit topped T$11.1 billion, or about $360 million, an increase over the T$5.695 billion a year earlier. Operating income climbed to NT$20.2 billion in the third quarter and earnings per share were NT$22.03. Revenue for the quarter was NT$135.8 billion, an eighty percent sequential increase.

Going forward, HTC is expected to benefit from the ongoing interest surrounding the Android platform and a new cloud services model stemming from their acquisition of Dashwire. HTC is ranked the fourth smartphone maker globally and was the leading Android vendor and the second-best smartphone maker in the United States last quarter.

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HTC reported second-quarter earnings today and just briefly glancing at numbers was enough to realize why they’re the #2 smartphone vendor in the US. Per their statement, HTC grew its revenues by 104 percent from the year-ago quarter and shipped 12.1 million phones during the June quarter. The company reported revenues of  NT$12.4 billion, or approximately $4.3 billion, a 19 percent sequential increase. Net income for the quarter topped NT$17.52, more than double from NT$60.96 billion in the year-ago quarter (and an 18 percent sequential jump).

The 12.1 million phones shipped include devices powered by Microsoft’s and Google’s software and amount to a 25 percent and 24 percent sequential and annual jump in terms of units, respectively. Looking at the third quarter, HTC is modeling for a 10 percent quarterly increase and a 90 percent annual jump based on shipments of an estimated 13.5 million phones.

New phone shipped in the quarter include the HTC Sensation, EVO 3D, Wildfire S, ChaCha, Salsa and Flyer. The average selling price dropped from $359 in the previous quarter down to $349 because they brought new inexpensive handsets to the market. Much of HTC’s growth came from Europe, Asia and the United States, where Nielsen ranks them as the second-largest smartphone maker. The achievement is even more impressive taking into account that Apple is now the world’s leading smartphone maker and controls two-thirds of total operating profits in the handset business.

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Samsung, which reported earnings today, also said it would stop reporting sales data and forecasts for its mobile phones and tablets, “probably due to its continuing legal battle with Apple”, analysts tell The Wall Street Journal. The company did not provide phone or tablet sales data in today’s earnings report, the decision Robert Yi, Samsung’s chief of investor relations, said in a conference call with analysts was due to competitive reasons:

As competition intensifies, there are increased risks that the information we provide may adversely affect our own businesses.

And in the earnings release Samsung only wrote that “shipments of mobile handsets increased in the high-single-digit range quarter-on-quarter”. Per latest IDC and ABI Research second-quarter cell phone survey, Samsung shipped…

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Motorola Mobility reported June quarter earnings today, nearly hitting Wall Street estimates with the reported GAAP net loss of $56 million, 19 cents a share. Revenues for the quarter topped $3.3 billion and non-GAAP earnings were nine cents a share. One of the noteworthy highlights includes shipments of 400,000 Xoom tablets, although the company wouldn’t divulge actual sell-through numbers. Xoom shipments amount to some 2.65% June tablet market share, per Strategy Analytics’s cumulative figures.The company also shipped eleven million mobile devices in total, including 4.4 million Android smartphones. Analyst Tomi Ahonen wrote on Twitter that Android shipments amount to an eight percent market share, making Motorola “8th biggest smartphone maker and 5th biggest Android”.

Xoom aren’t bad at all, actually a bit higher than the 300,000 units investors were expecting. Furthermore, the Xoom, Motorola’s inaugural Honeycomb tablet, arrived to market with little or no support from third-party developers plus devices from rivals ensued soon thereafter. Motorola benefited from an expanded distribution of the Atrix 4G smartphone and Motorola Xoom tablets in Latin America, China, Korea and Europe. They also rolled out four new smartphones in China. Moving forward, the company previously pledged to launch ten new devices in 2011 with Sprint, including Motorola Photon 4G which launches this weekend. Other tidbits right below…

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Sony Ericsson revealed in its most recent filing it sold 16 million Xperia smartphones to date

Sony Ericsson today reported earnings for the quarter ended June 30. Revenues topped €1.19 billion, a 68 percent annual decline from €1.76 billion a year ago. Smartphone sales accounted for more than 70 percent of the company’s total sales during the quarter and they estimated their share of the Android market at eleven percent by both volume and value. The company shipped 7.6 million handsets during the June quarter, 31 percent less units on an annual basis and well below the low-end consensus of eight million units.

However, they reported a net loss of €50 million, which is especially troubling given a more modest loss of €11 million in the previous quarter and a net profit of €12 million in the year-ago quarter. Moreover, Sony Ericsson’s cash position has gone from around $2.2 billion prior to the iPhone launch to -250 million now. On a brighter note, Sony Ericsson said it shipped more than sixteen million Xperia smartphones to date, with eight new models rolled out in this year alone, including the Xperia Active pictured above. President and CEO Bert Nordberg attributed the declining business to the Japan earthquake in a statement accompanying the earnings report:

Sony Ericsson’s second quarter profitability was affected by the March 11 earthquake in Japan. We estimate that the impact of earthquake-related supply chain constraints on our portfolio was close to 1.5 million units, with most of the effect in the early part of the quarter.

The full press release is right after the break.

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Samsung today posted a 26-percent drop in Q2 profits because its television and semiconductor operations are shrinking. Profits fell to 3.7 trillion won, or about $3.5 billion, versus 5.01 trillion in the year-ago quarter. The drop is being blamed on Samsung’s flat panel unit which is bleeding money for a second consecutive quarter now. Because demand for 3D TVs and consumer electronics in general is weakening, Samsung’s flat panel division has generated an operating loss of 73.5 billion won ($69.1 million) in the second quarter, Bloomberg explains. Just a year ago, the same unit profited 880 billion won (about $827 million). Slim margins and low prices in the cut-throat television business don’t help either. A Kiwoom Securities Co. analyst Kim Sung In slammed the company:

Only the phone business is holding up. Everything else is looking bad. There’s no bright picture for the company looking ahead.

Maybe the flat panel division will recover if Apple brings out an intelligent, networked television set in 2012 using flat panels from Samsung? It’s all peachy for their mobile devices unit which has benefited from strong smartphone and tablet sales. A recent comScore survey put Samsung as the #1 smartphone brand in the US that accounted for 24.8 percent share of all mobile phone subscribers aged 13 and up. What about other metrics?

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