News
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 [...]
Average Capacity of a 14.4Mbps HSPA Cell
The analysis by Neu Mobile has demonstrated that as a result of varying conditions, the average capacity of an HSPA 14.4Mbps cell is only 1.8Mbps. This is based [...]
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 [...]
ZTE Bumps Motorola
Anyone remember Siemens handsets…?
Researcher iSuppli says ZTE broke into the top five handset makers while Moto slipped to No. 6.
In much of the world, ZTE is better known as a maker of telecom networking equipment and data cards than cellphones. But research firm iSuppli says the Shenzhen-based technology company shipped enough [...]
FCC Okays Terrestrial LTE for SkyTerra
Daily wireles reports Infineon, SkyTerra, and TerreStar Networks are jointly developing a multi-standard mobile platform based on Infineon’s software-defined-radio (SDR) technology. Infineon’s SDR mobile platform, called XMM SDR 200, requires only one single baseband device, the X-GOLD™ SDR 20 and one single RF transceiver.
T-Mobile’s LT-Max
Daily Wireless has a nice article on LT-Max.
Similar to the FCC’s “White Space” initiative, where television band spectrum can be used by unlicensed devices, the T-Mobile proposal, called LT-MAX, would merge the technology of White Spaces (“listen before transmit” and transmitter mapping), with Software Defined Radios that can change frequency and [...]
ARM boosted startup with Belgian DSP
The EE Times has a nice article on Cognovo.
In November 2009, shortly after ARM (Cambridge, England) said it would close its DSP development operation in Heverlee, Belgium, Cognovo took on approximately half ARM’s Belgian contigent, according to a local report. In addition, ARM provided the vector signal processing IP developed there [...]
Term Sheet Provisions
A very nice post by Dave Broadwin at Foley Hoag on Term Sheet provisions. This is part 1 covering Dividends, Participating Preferred, Founder Representations, Option Vesting, Board of Directors, and Drag Along.
See also the NVCA standard term sheet.
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 – [...]