Market
Handset supplier revenue change
Source: BoA, Merrill Lynch
Europe and US telecom capex
Source: Barclays
The story is clearly different in the US, however, where both AT&T and Verizon Wireless are increasing spending materially this year. Verizon Wireless is only lifting capex by 5% despite embarking on its upgrade from CDMA EV-DO to LTE, indicating that the [...]
Smartphones to grow but with steep ASP declines
Goldman Sachs predicts despite the pricing pressure on smartphones, new capabilities such as broadband internet browsing and satellite navigation with turn-by-turn directions mean new connectivity options must be added.
Broadcom Baseband Customer Ramp Estimates
Goldman Sach’s expects Broadcom’s mobile and wireless segment to remain the company’s most critical growth driver through 2011, and the most critical swing factor for the stock as well. Following a series of recent checks, we believe we now have better visibility on the ramp of Broadcom’s cellular business, and we forecast Broadcom’s baseband revenue [...]
Smartphone OS Strategy
Source: Barclays Capital
Perhaps a better approach to examine rather than trying to ascribe a specific strategic value to WebOS, is to examine the competitive landscape in order to assess which vendors could potentially utilize the asset. In our view, while we cannot shut out the possibility of any leading OEM being interested in Palm, we believe [...]
MediaTek 2G Market Share
Source: Morgan Stanley
The key messages from management on 2G handsets were: 1. MediaTek believes the 2G export market is still significant as its market share in most EM markets outside of China is still below 30-35%, 2. The transition to SoC should reach cross over in shipments around mid-2010, 3. The company will layer [...]
Qualcomm Chipset ASP
Source: Morgan Stanley
Qualcomm reported a surprisingly weak FQ1 with even weaker FQ2 guidance as a lower ASPs for both handsets and chips drove revenue of $2,67B below our $2.77B estimate. Normalizing for $71M in out-of-period revenue boost from the new Samsung contract, “true” revenue of $2.6B was even lower, however within guidance of $2.55-2.75B.
Baseband Market Share by Revenue
Source: Merrill Lynch, BofA, IDC
The exit of Freescale and TI has left the baseband market concentrated around six vendors: Qualcomm, Mediatek, Infineon, Marvell, ST-Ericsson and Broadcom.
While we expect Qualcomm to further consolidate its high market share (through an increased presence at Motorola, share gains at Nokia), we believe that emerging vendors, namely Broadcom and Mediatek [...]
Smartphone Operating System Market Share
Source: Merrill Lynch BofA
At the high level, we see stark differences between the strategies of Microsoft and Google. While Google provides the OS for free, aiming to move all services to the Cloud and trying to monetize via ad revenues and user information, Microsoft has tried to replicate its PC model and charge $15 – [...]
Smartphone Market by OEM
Source: BofA, Merrill Lynch
From the perspective of unit shipments, last year (trailing twelve months or TTM) shipments of smartphones were 158.9mn, up 6% YoY, a sharp deceleration from the 22% growth in 2008. However we attribute this to the macro weakness.
Nokia slightly lost share, down from 40% in 2008 to 39% in 2009e and down [...]
Android Surges Among Handset Purchasers
Between September and December 2009, the proportion of future smartphone buyers who planned to purchase an Android-based phone jumped from 6% to 21%.
2G/3G Patent IP Ownership
Interesting charts on who owns what 2G/3G IP and what they collect in royalties for that IP.
The same report states that Apple pays significantly less royalty for the iPhone. It is suspected to be in the 5.5% range.
The iHog iPhone
The average iPhone user consumes 5-7x the monthly bandwidth of an average wireless voice subscriber, and 2x+ the amount of an average 3G/smartphone phone user, or 250 – 350 MB. Despite notable usage differences, 3G pricing plans for smartphones in the US have remained relatively fixed price, in contrast to usage based pricing offerings in [...]
Handset industry recovers from a trough, but who would benefit going forward?
During its 3Q09 results release, Nokia raised its 2009 global handset shipment forecast from -10% to -7% yoy. Goldman Sachs believes this signals that the worst is over for the global handset market; although this seemed to be widely expected by the market, handsetrelated stocks reacted positively post Nokia results (23% /55% share price appreciation for [...]