Taiwan’s Acer (TPE: 2353) reported its 2014 fiscal year earnings Wednesday, after the markets closed in Taipei and the company reported its first slim profit in three years.

The company reported revenue of $10.39 billion, down 23% year-over-year, but its gross profit grew 28.3% year-over-year to $925 million.

“The results show that Acer has stayed profitable throughout the entire year, with increasing profits each consecutive quarter, and has steadily turned its operations around,” Acer said in a press release. “We’ve kept adjusting the product mix contingent upon the demands of various markets.”

Jason Chen is already writing his legacy

Move the clocks back a year ago and things weren’t looking good for the company that’s considered one of the pillars of Taiwan’s PC-making industry. Acer’s then-new CEO, Jason Chen, who was installed in the company’s top position was looking at an ailing company. The PC market showed no signs of recovering, and while Acer had made considerable efforts to branch out to other markets such as tablets, smartphones and cloud, this diversification was not enough to stem the losses.

But over the last year, a series of wins for Acer turned things around. Its Chromebooks had a warm reception from consumers and its cloud business started to grow. Then the PC business once again began to pick up, growing even more once Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) announced Windows 10.

In a January profile piece from Bloomberg, Chen said that this year would be a year of growth, not recovery, for Acer.

“The turnaround is pretty much done,” he said. This year, “we should no longer talk about turnaround.”

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Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has reported its best fiscal quarter ever, with revenue and profit figures surpassing analyst expectations. The numbers speak for themselves, both in nominal terms and with respect to year-on-year growth. In fact, this is the most profitable quarter in corporate history, surpassing the quarterly earnings records of Gazprom, Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil, which were previously in the top three.

For the first fiscal quarter of 2015 (ending December 31, 2014), Apple reports a quarterly profit of $18 billion from revenue of $74.6 billion, a year-on-year revenue growth of 29.5% and profit growth of 27.2%. In this fiscal quarter, diluted earnings per share (EPS) of $3.06, a 47.8% increase from last year’s $2.07 diluted EPS. This surpasses analyst expectations of $2.60 earnings per share.

Guidance for second fiscal quarter indicates that Apple is likely to earn $52 to $55 billion in revenue. The company has announced cash dividends of $0.47 per share, payable in February.

In this quarterly report, we can glean a few things about Apple’s business so far. In gist, the company performs well during holiday seasons. The iPhone has been the biggest driver of revenue for the company in this quarter, so far, even amid the iPhone 6 having a slow start. The iPad, however, has performed dismally. And in a surprising twist, China has become a big driver of growth for the company, even with some initial hiccups in the launch and sales of the iPhone 6.

iPhone in the stocking. Apple’s best quarters prior to this one had been the first quarters of fiscal years 2012, 2013 and 2014, which fall in the months of October through December. This suggests that, as expected, holiday sales are a big revenue driver.  For Q1 FY2015, Apple sold 74.5 million iPhones, up from 51 million in the same period last year — a 46% year-on-year growth.  This is the first full fiscal quarter after Apple launched the iPhone 6 and 6 plus, and even with some initial concerns about the whether the bigger form factor of the plus will sell, as well as supply issues at the start of the iPhone 6’s product cycle, sales figures for Apple’s smartphones will suggest that it’s a runaway hit.

Will the iPad be sustainable? The short answer is “yes” — at least Apple CEO Tim Cook thinks so. For this quarter, iPad sales actually fell 21% year-on-year, which may be an indication that the company’s latest tablet lineup has weakened, even as the prices for previous-generation iPad Air and iPad Mini models have been reduced. One school of thought will say that iPad sales are being cannibalized by the iPhone 6 Plus on the low-end and the MacBook air on the higher-end. However, Cook is still optimistic about the product line, and that these sales figures are still within expected range. Cook admits that “the upgrade cycle is longer” compared to smartphones, speaking during investor guidance. “I believe that over long arc of time that the iPad is the great business, I also have visibility obviously of what’s in the pipeline and feel very, very good about that,” he adds.

Scaling the great wall. Apart from record-breaking revenues and profits in the past quarter, Apple is also seeing promise in a market that had been considered difficult for western firms to break into: China. Today’s largest economy is also the fastest-growing market for Apple’s goods. Revenue for this market amounts to $16.1 billion, comprising 21% of the company’s earnings during the period. This is a 70% growth from the same quarter in Fiscal Year 2014, and a 157% quarter-on-quarter growth.

This means Apple was able to bounce back after a disappointing iPhone 6 launch, in which the product was severely delayed in the market. Another feather on Apple’s cap: the iPhone has taken top spot in smartphone shipments in China, according to Canalys, even beating Xiaomi.

Watch out for April. Since taking over the reins, there has always been question whether Tim Cook will live up to his predecessor’s legacy. It was, after all, during the second tenure of Steve Jobs as chief executive when Apple bounced back with the iMac, then followed up by other revolutionary products like the iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and the like. This record quarter is testament to Cook’s ability as a strategist, even as Apple has only been continuing existing product lines, so far.

This April, however, Apple expects to launch its first wearable, the Apple Watch. “The creativity and software innovation going on around Apple Watch is incredibly exciting and we can’t wait for our customers to experience them when Apple Watch becomes available,” says Cook. It may be argued that Apple is already coming late in the smartwatch game. But perhaps the quality of the platform and ecosystem will be the main differentiator, just as the apps and the App Store had been a game changer in the smartphone industry in 2007. “The number of developers that are writing apps more for it are impressive and we’re seeing some incredible innovation coming out there,” Cook adds.

Will 2015 be Tim Cook’s year? With an expanding business, impressive cash stockpile and an ambitious foray into the wearables market, it looks like an exciting year ahead for Apple.

The post Apple’s Q1 FY2015: Most Profitable Quarter in Corporate History appeared first on VR World.

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) announced Thursday during its earnings call that it had beaten its goal of getting 40 million of its chips into tablets, but its CEO swears off doing such a play ever again because of the cost involved.

While Intel, thanks to its contra revenue program, was able surpass its target of shipping 40 million tablet chips — hitting 46 million — this victory came at a staggering cost as the mobile and communications division posted a loss of $4.21 billion for the 2014 fiscal year. Income for the division for the year was razor thin, only coming in at $202 million. This is down 85% from last year’s $1.4 billion of revenue, while the division’s losses increased by nearly $1.1 billion.

“This goal was intended to establish Intel Architecture in the marketplace,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said during the company’s earnings call.

“We don’t need to go out and outpace the market for this year,” he continued. “A key goal for mobility is to improve profitability.”

A healthy year overall

As far as other divisions of the company Intel’s PC group posted a healthy $14.6 billion in income on $34.7 billion in revenue for the fiscal year, with revenue rising $1.4 billion compared to the year prior. For the quarter revenue was $8.87 billion, down 3% from the last quarter but up 3% from the same time last year.

The company’s server group, known for its Xeon chips that power the web, posted an operating profit of $7.28 billion on revenue of $14.4 billion for the year. For the quarter revenue came in at $4.09 billion up 11% from last quarter and up 25% from the same time last year.

The new Internet of Things Group saw its revenue jump by 19% year-over-year to $2.1 billion. For the quarter the IoT division posted revenue of $591 million, up 12% from the last quarter and 10% from the same time last year.

Overall the company posted revenue $55.9 billion, operating income of $15.3 billion, net income of $11.7 billion and an earnings per share of $2.31

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MediaTek (TPE: 2454) announced late Thursday that it had posted a 6% rise in profits quarter-over-quarter, earning $435 million in the third quarter of 2014.

The chip designer’s revenue for the period rose by 6.2% to $1.8 billion. Wall Street had expected slightly more, and the revenue growth comes in at the low end of the guidance issued by MediaTek last month. The company said that it was expecting growth between 5-13%.  The company also reported that its profit margin fell 0.5% from a quarter prior to 49.1%.

MediaTek’s CFO Ta Wei Ku said during an earnings conference call that MediaTek missed expectations because of a faster than expected transition to 4G from 3G.

“I think for the third quarter numbers, in general, the smartphones are maybe a little bit softer than – relatively speaking, while we’re giving out the guidance, 5% to 13%,” he said during the call. “I guess most likely, it’s because the 3G and 4G transition actually happened actually pretty strong in the third quarter. And for 4G products, currently for third quarter, the major product we have is still dual-chip solution.”

MediaTek executives said that they expect the company’s profit margin and earnings to dip in the next quarter as it spends more money on research and development in order to better compete in the baseband market.

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Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) reported fairly mixed numbers across the board for its fiscal Q3 2015 quarter, which is represented mostly by the calendar third quarter of the year.

In the third quarter, Nvidia reported a record $1.23 billion in revenues and profit of $173 million, which translates to an EPS of $0.31. This is compared to the previous quarter, where Nvidia saw $1.103 billion in revenue and $128 million in profit or an EPS of $0.22. Nvidia also improved over the same quarter a year ago even more significantly where that quarter only had $1.054 billion in revenue and $119 million in revenue  or an EPS of $0.20. Nvidia saw both revenue and profitability increase double digits for both quarter over quarter and year over year, which should make any investor in Nvidia very happy. The margins did slip almost a whole percentage point, but they also significantly improved revenue and profitability.

Nvidia’s revenue increase to $1.23 billion can be attributed to growth across the board for the company in multiple business segments. Revenue for its GPU business grew 13% from the previous quarter and notebooks grew 36%, fueled by the release of its new Maxwell GTX GeForce consumer cards and mobile gaming GPUs. Nvidia states that mobile gaming notebooks more than doubled from a year ago, indicating much stronger PC gaming growth than analysts had been dooming and glooming.

Tesla GPU sales increased strongly, representing another record quarter for revenue driven mostly by large project wins in GPU compute with cloud providers and government customers. The company also saw Quadro revenue continue to be strong, also helped along by its launch of the new Quadro line, including the K5200, which is squarely aimed at Adobe users. As a result, the whole business unit saw a 13% increase in revenue due to the Maxwell release and seasonal increase in consumer PCs, which is going to only continue into the next quarter.

Tegra processors grew 51 percent from a year ago, mostly led by automotive infotainment systems, mobile devices, embedded systems and SHIELD tablet sales. Automotive infotainment revenue alone nearly doubled year over year, which can strongly be attributed to Tegra’s renewed strength compared to last year. As a whole the business unit saw revenue go up 11% sequentially. Nvidia has won some seriously significant automotive design wins, including Honda and will create a very good baseline of sales for Nvidia in the Tegra business unit regardless of mobile device seasonality.

Nvidia also saw a $66 million license payment from Intel from their settlement and licensing agreement.

Nvidia guided its revenue to be about $1.2 billion, essentially flat with the last quarter. They also expect margins to stay about the same if not increase a bit from the last quarter and operating expenditures to increase slightly. Overall, next quarter should really be a fantastic one for Nvidia as it is traditionally the strongest quarter for most of their consumer products and they are currently putting the hurting on AMD in consumer GPU sales, they are also in the newly announced HTC Nexus 9, which means that Tegra shipments should be very good in the fourth quarter and should drive up its profitability in the business segment. Overall, Nvidia’s expectations for Q4 are very conservative and there’s a very good chance they will outperform significantly.

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Seagate (NASDAQ: STX) enjoyed healthy growth in demand and revenue for the first quarter of its 2015 fiscal year, thanks to an increase in demand for storage from a resurgent PC market as well as the need to store an increasing amount of big data in the cloud.

In an earnings call, company boss Steve Luczo said that Seagate’s shipments had grown 23% to 60 million exabytes. Seagate reported it had shipped 59.5 million units during the quarter,  compared with 52.5 million in the previous quarter and 55.7 million during the same time last year.  All in all, this resulted in revenues of $3.79 billion which were up 8.5% from the same time last year. Net income slipped to $381 million from $427 million, during the same period last year.

Overall these results beat Wall Street’s estimates, which had expected Seagate to pull in revenues of $3.63 billion.

Always a market for hard disks

Despite the rising popularity of solid state drives, the technology is still in in its relative infancy compared to the tried-and-true technology of hard drives.

At Computex 2013, Seagate’s BS Teh, the managing director for the company in Asia and a Senior Vice President, was quoted as being perpetually optimistic for the future of the product his company is most famous for.

“Demand for storage continues to go unabated. It’s becoming more and more of a realization that SSDs are not going to take over the world. They will grow, but it is impossible given the current investment run rate for SSDs to take over disk drives, “ he is quoted as saying last year. “Financially, and economically it is also impossible for it to happen — in the immediate future. If you put all these together, the storage industry is a great place to be and the hard disk industry is a good place to be at this time.”

Over a year later, the same holds true and Teh would likely say the same thing if asked today. While Seagate and the like may be losing a market in the mobile world, the much higher-margin enterprise sector still has a strong hunger for hard disk storage.

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Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) reported its earnings Tuesday for the last quarter of the company’s fiscal year revealing it had generated $42.1 billion in revenue and $8.5 billion in profit.

This translates to an earnings per share of $1.42 per share, which is well above what Wall Street’s consensus was of around $1.31 as well as revenue of about $40 billion. This means that Apple has once again beaten Wall Street’s lofty expectations, partially helped by the strongest iPhone launch in the company’s history with the launch of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. This represents a continuation of the company’s profitability even though Apple as a company has significantly changed internally. Apple was able to ship 39 million iPhones, roughly in line with what many analysts were expecting, but still above the average expected 37.5 million consensus. Apple also saw huge growth in the Mac sales thanks to the back to school season and they have now seen market share increase to some of the highest levels in over a decade.

Apple reported that its gross margin went up 1 point in the quarter, to 38% up from 37% in the same quarter a year ago, representing the increase in profitability. Additionally, Apple only reported $37 billion in revenue in the same quarter a year ago, showing that Apple has continued to drive the company upward year over year. Apple also stated that 60% of the revenue generated in the third quarter came from international sales, which also means that a lot of the cash flow generated from operations, $13.3 billion worth, will very likely stay abroad. Apple’s board also announced a $0.47 dividend for November 13th this year, and will be issued to holders of the stock on November 10th this year.

Apple Earnings

Apple also guided their fiscal first quarter of 2015, calendar Q4 2014, to a record revenue to $63.5 billion and 66.5 billion, they also expect gross margin to be somewhere between 37.5 and 38.5 percent.

Apple’s current share price is at $99.76 but it is already trading higher in after hours trading, once again breaking the $100 barrier up over 1% to $101.26.

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Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) reported earnings for the third quarter of 2014, reporting $16.52 billion in revenue and $2.81 billion in profit. This represents a 20% increase year-over-year for revenue, but a decrease of 5% profitability over the same quarter a year ago. Google reported an EPS of $6.35 which is lower than what was expected of $6.53 and a fairly significant miss of Thomson Reuters’ consensus expected price.

Part of the reason why Google missed on earnings was due to the fact that a lot of Google’s foreign earnings grew very well, but as a result of a strong dollar those revenues didn’t translate to as much profit. Google also saw smaller growth in paid clicks, which was 17% rather than the expected 23.5% from Wall Street, additionally the cost per click continued to go down. In the quarter Google reported a decrease of 2% in cost per click which is also why Google may have appeared to not look as good as previous quarters. However, analysts expected that Google’s cost per click would actually go down 4% quarter over quarter, so Google actually outperformed expectations there.

Overall, Google still appears to be a very solid company with very solid profitability with operating profit still representing 23% of revenues at $3.72 billion, which is nothing to balk at. Google also announced three new Nexus devices, the Nexus 9, Nexus 6 and Nexus Play devices yesterday with the Nexus 9 and Nexus Play going on pre-order tomorrow. While it remains to be seen how this new hardware will affect Google’s earnings for the 4Q of 2014, they will very likely be very successful with the Nexus 9 and Nexus 6 as both devices have been long awaited. And realistically, the Nexus devices will mostly sell in the fourth quarter and many will very likely be purchased for the holiday season so we could see Google’s revenue take a slight bump. But even so, it is merely a drop in the bucket in terms of Google’s $16 billion+ in revenue per quarter.

For the company’s 4Q 0f 2014, the biggest earnings will come from increased spending from retailers and advertisers for this holiday season and consumers go to Google to search for things to buy. Since the majority of Google’s revenue and profitability still come from traditional Google search, this holiday season should result in a fairly strong quarter if people are actively searching for products to buy.

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Today, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) reported its earnings for the third quarter of 2014.

Intel’s expected consensus earnings were $0.65 per share, while the company reported an EPS of $0.66  on record $14.6 billion  in revenue. As a whole Intel reported $3.3 billion in profit on $14.6 billion in revenue. It also generated approximately $5.7 billion in cash from operations and paid back $1.1 billion in the form of dividends to investors for the quarter while using $4.2 billion to repurchase 122 million shares of stock. This is very likely thanks to the strength of the PC market recently in North America and Europe. Intel’s earnings for the quarter were up nearly 20% quarter over quarter and their revenue was up 5% quarter over quarter. When you look at the same time a year ago, Intel’s profit was up 12% and revenue was up 8%.

For Intel’s business divisions, Intel once again saw a mixed bag of results. Its PC Client Group saw revenue grow to $9.2 billion, up 6% sequentially and 9% year over year. Its Data Center Group also saw sizable improvement, growing to $3.7 billion from growth of 5% sequentially and 16% year over year (showing Intel’s renewed server growth). The IoT Group saw revenue of $530 million, down 2% sequentially and up 14% year over year. As far as the mobile efforts go, its Mobile and Communications group saw revenues of only $1 million, consistent with Intel’s expectations. Lastly, software and services operating group also saw revenues of $558 million, up 2% year over year and sequentially.

What will it take for Intel to compete in mobile?

Intel is still struggling to compete in the mobile space, continuing to take heavy losses of over $1 billion (now at $3 billion this year alone) and having very few design wins to show for. It’s very likely going to consider their upcoming Broadwell chips as part of their mobile push, but the truth is that those chips are still going into laptops and high-end tablets rather than smartphones and affordable tablets where the real volumes lie. The new Core M processors are showing some serious promise, but they are still too expensive to put into a smartphone or tablet even though their power consumption is impressively low thanks to the new 14nm process. But they still need to find a way to make themselves relevant in smartphones and tablets, especially when you consider how much money they’re spending to keep that division going.

There is one seriously troubling business metric here that Intel is clearly trying to hide. That’s the Mobile and Communications Group. It reported a minuscule $1 million in revenue for a division that last quarter reported $51 million in revenue, that’s a reduction of around 98% quarter over quarter. And when you look at 2Q 2014 against the previous quarter (1Q 2014) their Mobile and Communications Group was already down 67 percent sequentially and down 83 percent year-over-year. What’s even crazier is that if you look at the Mobile and Communications Group revenues for the 1Q 2014, the company was already having a hard time while earning $156 million in revenue. During 1Q 2014, Intel reported $156 million in revenue which was already down 52% sequentially and down 61% year over year. Intel has successfully eviscerated their entire mobile division to effectively nothing, Investors are absolutely going to demand that Intel abandon their mobile push because it clearly isn’t working and its costing the company billions of dollars per year to run, essentially, into the ground.

Intel also recently announced its new Core i7 5960X along with a full line of Haswell-E based performance processors for the X99 motherboard platform, which now uses DDR4 instead of DDR3. However, this launch came at the tail end of 3Q 2014, and very likely won’t affect Intel’s sales as much as it will in 4Q 2013. It also launched the accompanying Xeon E5 v3 family of server processors, also based on Haswell-E and also running DDR4 shortly after the announcement of the Intel Core i7 Extreme processor. Both lines bring valuable advancements to Intel’s own server and high performance desktop lines, where the company is strongest.

Intel also guided for the 4Q of 2014, stating that it expects to once again have record revenues to the tune of $14.7 billion, plus or minus $500 million and that they expect gross margin to go down to 64% from 65%. They expect R&D to increase a bit from $4.8 billion to $4.9 billion, even though the previous quarter was $4.9 billion, so it isn’t really much of a change.
Q4 2014. Intel was trading up 2% during regular hours and is now trading up around 2% in after hours trading.

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Our sources are confirming to us that AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) will undergo another major restructuring of the company. This restructuring follows the recent reorganization of the company’s overall organization headed by Dr. Lisa Su and John Byrne. The latest restructuring was announced around the time of Computex and based upon a split of the company into two separate divisions. This restructuring seemed like one merely on paper, shifting over some responsibilities from one person to the other but keeping all divisions and staff intact.

Those two divisions are the Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom Business Group and Computing and Graphics Business Group. As stated before, John Byrne will be responsible for the Computing and Graphics Business Group while Lisa Su will head up the Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom Business Group. Now, the restructuring that is being discussed now (and supposedly already being set in motion) is supposed to be an extension of June’s reorganization/restructuring. This will very likely result in some people changing their roles within the company as well as some people being laid off, as generally seem to happen with major reorganizations. While there are no definite figures of how many people will be let go, it did not sound like those numbers were massive like the culling of 2009 through 2012.

Unfortunately, there aren’t that many details about exactly how many people could be laid off, but this sounds like a long term plan execution rather than a reactionary cut due to poor earnings. However, there were some indications that this next restructuring would very likely come after AMD’s 3Q 2014 earnings which is on the 16th. It remains to be seen how investors will react to this news, but if AMD has poor earnings for 3Q 2014, it may be seen as a reactionary restructuring rather than a planned one which is how it was interpreted by our sources. We are labeling this as a rumor because it isn’t an official announcement, however this is essentially already a done deal.

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Twitter [NYSE:TWTR] today reported their earnings for the second quarter of the year, beating out all expectations and further raising their outlook for the next quarter and the whole year as well. The company reported that revenue rose to $312.2 million, up from $139.3 million a year ago, more than double. This is a significant beat of where Twitter had guided as well, as they had guided $270 to $280 million while the Thomson Reuters analyst poll had the average expectation at $283.1 million. However, the company still posted a GAAP net loss of $144.6 million, but most of this has to do with a $158 million charge due to share compensation. Non-GAAP earnings was actually at $14.6 million.

Twitter also guided their revenue and earnings for the third quarter of 2014 upward. They project revenue to be in the range between $330 and $340 million and that EBITDA will be between $40 and $45 million. They did, however, also say that stock-based compensation expenses are expected to be in the range of $180 to $190 million, excluding the impact of equity awards.

Twitter also said that they added 16 million active monthly users worldwide. The 6.3% growth, which brought the company to 271 million users is up from the 5.8% growth figure from the previous quarter. Analysts had their expectations for growth to be between 8 and 15 million active monthly users, which means that they REALLY beat everyone’s projections. This can likely be tied to Twitter’s incredibly strong mobile presence and their increasing relationships with media and advertisers in ways that their competitors like Facebook simply can’t. This is also a user growth of 24% year over year, which is also quite impressive. A lot of people have been talking about the relevance of Twitter and whether or not they’re stagnating, but today’s earnings clearly indicate that it is quite the opposite.

Twitter also reported that they had revised their outlook for 2014 as a whole. They changed their revenue projections to $1.31 billion to $1.330 billion and their EBITDA to be in the range between $210 million and $230 million. Their expected capital expenditures are projected to be in the range of $330 to $390 million and stock-based compensation is projected to be in the range of a whopping $640 million to $690 million excluding the impact of equity awards that could be granted in the connection with potential future acquisitions.

Overall, things look to be REALLY great for Twitter, better than anyone was really expecting. So much so that the stock is continuing to climb upward, at 35% at the time of writing. Obviously this kind of growth can’t continue forever, but Twitter still needs to obtain GAAP profitability and that will only come once they figure out how to squeeze more ad revenue and other sources of income out of their nearly 300 million audience. Twitter is without a doubt a valuable resource with many people tweeting tons, but the real value will come in promoted Tweets which appear to be fairly well received by many and are not overly intrusive as some had feared. It will be interesting to see if Twitter can pull off back to back earnings beats, but the reality is that they will probably continue to grow at a steady pace and add users and improve profitability. It really helps that most of their users are mobile.

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LG’s turnaround appears to have completed with today’s earnings results. According to LG’s very own earnings announcement for the past quarter (2Q 2014), the company shipped 14.5 million smartphones, a record high for the company. This is primarily driven by the fact that LG finally knows how to not only make a great smartphone, but also how to market it and sell it to consumers, something they kind of lacked with previous phones like the LG Optimus G and the LG G2. Both the Optimus G and G2 were fantastic devices and pretty much owned the competition whenever they were introduced. However, with the G3, LG clearly learned their lessons from the Optimus G and G2 and were able to capitalize on those lessons to sell more smarphones than ever before. It also helps that LG is still the manufacturer for Google’s Nexus 5 which is still a quite popular phone.

LG has also learned quite a few lessons on how to make software and how not to ruin the Android operating system like some of their competitors have done (ahem, Samsung). So, when people take the LG G3 in their hands, they don’t feel like its a ‘slow’ phone relative to the others. LG’s decision to also go with a higher resolution display also helps the display look much sharper than the competition, which is a big factor when people are looking at a phone.

Obviously, $400 million in profit on $15 billion in revenue is nothing to run around the streets cheering about, as that is still a profit margin of less than 3%. However, it still reflects a 165% increase in profitability from the same period a year ago and is a result of stronger mobile and TV sales (LG’s profit numbers include all divisions together). The mobile unit alone, however, managed to pull in $3.5 billion in revenue and squeeze out about $83.4 million in profit. In fact, LG’s strongest business unit was their air conditioning and energy solutions company, which means that LG’s mobile and TV businesses still have a lot of room to improve upon, but clearly they’ve made some serious progress because $400 million in profit is still quite good.

This is a good turn around for LG’s mobile division and it will be interesting to see how they build on it after the G3, especially with Samsung and HTC following their every step. What I can tell you, though, is that LG is bringing some serious competition to Samsung and HTC and is forcing them to be more competitive on pricing as well. After all, the G3 actually launched at $99 on contract, forcing the Galaxy S5 and One M8 to also drop down to that price if they weren’t there already.

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Qualcomm just announced their earnings for the fiscal third quarter of 2014 which includes the calendar second quarter of 2014, and their earnings were strong as ever. Qualcomm reported $2.24 billion in profit on $6.81 billion in revenues, this represents a 9 percent growth in revenue year over year as well as a 7 percent growth over the previous quarter. Profits also grew a whopping 42 percent year over year and 14 percent sequentially, squashing investors’ worries that Qualcomm’s caution last year about flatter revenues might affect profitability. Diluted EPS was $1.31, up 46 percent year over year and 15 percent sequentially. These earnings figures can most likely be attributed to Qualcomm’s absolute dominance of the high-end and mid-range Android market where their Snapdragon 801 chip won design wins in all of the most sought after and best selling phones.

In fact, the Snapdragon 801 alone is in the Samsung Galaxy S5, HTC One M8 and the LG G3, all three of which are considered to be the best Android phones on the market today. In addition to those devices, the Xiaomi Mi4 and the OnePlus One also feature Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 801 chip. If you take this into account, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 801 chip absolutely dominates the competition and this is certainly helping Qualcomm to continue to drive growth.

Qualcomm also stated that they would be narrowing their guidance for the fiscal fourth quarter as well as the full fiscal year of 2014. This does not necessarily translate to a reduction in their expected revenue and profitability, but it does mean that their high end comes down a bit and their low end goes up. And the truth is, they usually hit somewhere between the midpoint and the high-end, which may cause some concern for some investors constantly expecting huge growth. They have guided the fiscal fourth quarter’s revenues to be $6.5 billion to $7.4 billion, flat to up 14 percent year over year as well as non-GAAP EPS at $1.20 to $1.35 up 14 to 29 percent year over year, a pretty decent improvement if you ask me. However, for that same quarter Qualcomm also cautioned that they expect to see a reduction in licensing revenues “to reflect some near-term challenges in China.”

For the whole year, though, Qualcomm has reaffirmed their guidance midpoint for revenue and narrowed the figures to $26.3 billion to $27.2 billion from the previous guidance of $26.0 billion and $27.5 billion, a total narrowing of $300 million. They raised their non-GAAP EPS guidance by $0.14 at the midpoint to $5.21 to $5.36 per share indicating a 16-19 percent growth year over year as opposed to the previous guidance of $5.05 to $5.25. Even so, Qualcomm’s shares are down a steep 3.49 percent in after hours trading on today’s earnings news, even though I suspect that it will likely be erased over the course of the earnings call, which should begin shortly. What is slightly bizarre, though, is that investors are dumping Qualcomm’s shares even though Broadcom just announced an exit from the baseband modem business, making Qualcomm’s business even stronger. However, Nvidia appears to be picking up some steam with their Tegra K1 mobile chip and could actually become some sort of a competitor against Qualcomm, especially since they still have their own applications processors and modems, and not many others do. Mediatek  could be a factor in the licensing business challenges, but Qualcomm hasn’t said anything yet that directly addresses that and we’ll have to see if they do during the call.

The post Qualcomm: Record 3Q 2014 Earnings, Reaffirms Guidance appeared first on VR World.

Yesterday, AMD reported their earnings for the second quarter of 2014, with a lot of investors watching to see if AMD can complete their turnaround. They reported a net loss of $36 million even though they had an operating income of $63 million on $1.44 billion in revenue. Their non-GAAP operating income was $67 million and a non-GAAP profit of $17 million with the exclusion of the $49 million loss from debt redemption in the quarter, pushing the company’s GAAP earnings figures into the negative once again. Based upon these figures, this translates to a loss per share of $0.05, slightly more than what some investors and analysts were expecting.

The good news is that AMD’s revenue was up 3% sequentially and 24% year over year, thanks mostly to their increased semi-custom business bringing in vast console revenues. While these revenues are great for AMD, they are still fairly low margin and as a result, AMD’s gross margin is at 35%, nearly half of what Intel’s was last quarter. This margin disparity is partly what differentiates the two companies so drastically financially, but there are a lot of things that really separate the two even though they are the only two vendors of x86 chips for PCs.

Now, looking at AMD’s two different divisions from the last quarter, they had Computing Solutions and GVS (Graphics and Visual Solutions) each reporting increases in revenue and operating profitability. So, if you look at AMD’s business they are actually generating a profit, but due to the fact that they took a $49 million interest charge, they ended up losing money. Computing solutions reported $9 million in operating income on $669 million in revenue while GVS reported $82 million on $772 million in revenue. Clearly, AMD’s computing solutions business still needs some serious work in terms of operating income, but has improved from a $3 million operating loss last quarter. However, AMD’s strongsuit, GPUs, faltered a bit this quarter as they had reported $91 million in operating income last quarter compared to the $82 million this quarter. Most of this decrease was due to lower GPU sales, partially tied to the inevitable slowdown of cryptocurrency mining and the lack of excess demand from that community.

AMD also issued an outlook for Q3 2014 as well as the whole year of 2014. They expect that revenue will grow 2% sequentially, plus or minus 3% (???), which is honestly quite odd because I don’t remember the last time a company’s projected growth was smaller than the swing that they predict. They predict a growth of 2% with a swing of 6% (up 3% or down 3%). Ignoring this bizarre revenue projection, their projects for the rest of the year are incredibly conservative and muted, something their competitors in the same industry aren’t necessarily reporting. After all, there’s no denying that people will always look at Intel and AMD and if Intel is doing well, the expectation is that AMD should be too, unless they’re swapping market share.

However, AMD’s stock plunged 19% after earnings were announced, and today the stock has barely recovered as it currently sits down 16.85% at the time of writing. AMD obviously has a lot of shorts, probably more than almost any other stock in the semiconductor industry. So, whenever there’s bad news, even if not entirely all that bad, the stock seems to plummet. Now, the stock sits beneath $4, once again. The simple moving average for the majority of this year was at or below $4 and unless AMD does something seriously innovative or aggressive I don’t see that stock moving away from $4 any time soon. Upgrade, downgrade or neither, AMD simply does not have anything that can genuinely excite investors until 2016. We will see if AMD can actually complete this turnaround, I’m just not sure people want to keep hearing about non-GAAP profitability quarter over quarter when GAAP is really what gets looked at in a lot of cases. Additionally, I don’t know if AMD can continue to have lukewarm outlooks through 2014 as they don’t appear to have anything heavy hitting quite yet. Not to mention, Intel and Nvidia are not standing still, which means that AMD will not only have to innovate but do it at a faster pace than their competitors if they even want to have a chance in the future.

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Intel reported stronger than expected quarterly earning for the second calendar quarter of 2014. In Q2 2014, Intel [NASDAQ:INTC] managed to report $2.8 billion in profit on $13.8 billion in revenue. As a result, they reported an earnings per share of $0.55 and generated $5.5 billion in cash from operations. They also paid out dividends of $1.1 billion and used $2.1 billion to repurchase 74 million shares.

Now, compared to the previous quarter Intel’s revenue of $13.8 billion was $1 billion or 8% higher than the $12.8 billion reported last quarter. Additionally, they reported an increase of nearly 5% to their gross margin to 64.5% up from 59.6%. This is surely going to make a lot of Intel’s investors very happy and should translate to much higher profits, which it has. Intel’s $2.8 billion is an increase of 45% from the $1.9 billion profit figure that they reported last quarter, which makes Intel’s stock look really good. Compared to the same period a year ago, Intel’s revenue was also up about 8% and their profit was up 40% from $12.8 and $2.0 billion respectively.

Intel Financials

Intel’s earnings for each business division showed strength in almost every single division except for Mobile and Communications. The PC Client Group revenue was $8.7 billion, up 9 percent sequentially and up 6 percent year over year. Since Intel is generally considered a bellwether for the rest of the PC industry, nearly 10% of growth quarter over quarter in the PC business is huge. The 6 percent growth over the same quarter a year ago also means that this is more than a cyclical increase and that the PC industry may be starting to rebound. Their Data Center Group reported $3.5 billion in revenue which was a healthy 14 percent sequentially and a whopping 19 percent. This has traditionally been Intel’s rock and most reliable source of reliable revenue and profit growth as the PC Client Group struggled over the past 2 years. In their Internet of Things Group (IoT) they reported revenue of $539 million, up 12 percent over the previous quarter and 24 percent other the same period a year ago. This looks great for Intel’s IoT business, but the truth is that a year ago there was almost no IoT business for anyone, so it seems a bit too early to start comparing to a year ago. But still, 12 percent over the previous quarter isn’t bad except for the fact that IoT is supposed to be one of the biggest growth sectors in semiconductors right now. And now for Intel’s black eye, the Mobile and Communications Group which reported a measly $51 million in revenue and reported a decrease of revenue from the previous quarter of 67 percent and a decrease compared to the same quarter a year ago of 83 percent. Their software and services operating segments reported revenues of $548 million, basically flat (down one percent) over the previous quarter and up 3 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago. Obviously this would be considered mostly flat, so many will mostly ignore this division when looking at Intel’s earnings.

Intel also reported their outlook for the third quarter of 2014 as well as the full year 2014. In the third quarter of 2014 they expect to report $14.4 billion in revenue, give or take $500 million. They also expect gross margin to increase to 66 percent, from 64.5 percent, plus or minus a few points. For the full year of 2014 Intel increased their outlook for revenue growth, expecting overall revenue growth of 5 percent, slightly higher than previous expectations (making investors very happy).

For Intel as a company, they have done very well this quarter and that is quite obvious. However, Intel’s mobility division that focuses on tablets and smartphones has taken an absolute beating and may indicate a serious weakness in their business plans. Intel has been promising better and better chips for tablets and smartphones, which may actually be true, however Intel has failed to gain serious design wins and as a result they only reported $51 million in revenue last quarter which is shameful compared to their biggest competitors, MediaTek and Qualcomm. I don’t know what Intel has planned to resolve these issues for the second half of 2014, but the second quarter of 2014 was an ugly one for Intel’s mobile division and that may scare some investors knowing how important it is to have a strong mobile presence.

The post Intel Reports Stronger Q2 2014, Raises Expectations appeared first on VR World.

HTC today announced their earnings for the second fiscal quarter of 2014, Q2 2014. They posted a quarterly profit of NT$2.26 billion ($76.5 million), or NT$2.74 ($0.09 USD) per share on $65.06 billion NT ($2.18 billion USD). HTC’s shares were up as high as 4% on Taipei’s exchange trading this morning (Taipei time). Many people were interested to see how well HTC would perform because of their new HTC One M8 which we’ve reviewed. Based upon their current performance, it seems clear that HTC’s moves clearly resulted in improved profitability and a change in the company’s tide of losses from the previous quarters. Granted, they didn’t actually hemorrhage money in any quarter, they did post some of the biggest losses in the company’s history which led to many people questioning whether or not HTC could survive. Now that this question has been answered HTC can continue to move forward with their strategy without worrying as much about what investors will think about their decisions.

The HTC One M8

There are a lot of rumors that HTC will be picked to make the next Nexus device, likely the Nexus 9 tablet which should allow HTC to increase their revenue and hopefully profitability as well. If they are able to successfully manufacturer a successor to the HTC One Max and upgrade the display, camera and processor, they can probably compete with Samsung, LG and Apple this fall. Right now there aren’t that many smartphone players in the industry that are profitable, but HTC can once again consider themselves among the profitable ones.

It will be interesting to see whether or not the company will actually manufacture a tablet since they haven’t actually done so since they made the Flyer, their attractive but failed Android tablet nearly 3 years ago. Considering that the specs of that tablet are nowhere near the rumored specs of the Nexus 9 tablet that HTC is rumored to be building for Google, it would be a vast improvement for the company’s image and would hopefully encourage them to make more tablets and innovative devices like the HTC One.

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As we had reported, Nvidia announced very strong preliminary earnings for the fiscal first quarter of 2015, calendar Q1 2014. They were supposed to announce their earnings today, May 8th, however someone had mistakenly sent the preliminary earnings announcement to 100 internal users and they decided to make those figures public to avoid any potential insider trading issues.

In terms of Nvidia’s earnings [NASDAQ:NVDA] themselves, the company reported for their fiscal first quarter of 2015, which is actually the first calendar quarter of 2014, earnings of $136 million on $1.1 billion in revenue, which is down sequentially from the fourth quarter where Nvidia is traditionally their strongest. As a result, it is expected to see that their revenue was down 4% quarter over quarter and profit down the same amount. In fact, it is actually really good to only take a 4% quarter over quarter reduction from your strongest quarter, most companies generally see a much larger decrease because of how big their third and fourth quarters are for their business. So, then, it comes as no surprise that when compared to the same quarter a year ago, Nvidia was actually up 16% in terms of revenue ($954 million last year vs. $1,102 this year) and 85% in terms of profitability, which is HUGE. Nvidia took in $77.9 million in profit in their first quarter last year, compared to $136 million this year which accounts for the 85% GAAP increase. Now, if you look at their non-GAAP EPS, then you’ll see that it is a slightly more moderated 61% increase, but even so, it indicates Nvidia is strong as ever, even with some weaker business units.

GAAP EPS were $0.24, up 85% from $0.13 a year ago and down 4% from $0.25 in the previous quarter, and non-GAAP earnings were $0.29, up 61% from $0.18 and down 9% from $0.32 in the previous quarter. Nvidia also saw their gross margin grow to 54.8 % from the previous quarter’s 54.1 % to the same quarter a year ago’s 54.3.

Nvidia Quarterly Revenue by Business Unit

As you can see above, Nvidia’s revenue in their GPU business was actually down quarter over quarter, considering the seasonality of GPU sales, but still up 14% year over year. This is primarily because of Nvidia’s renewed strength in their mobile GPU business in laptops where they saw their strongest marketshare since 2010.  They also saw some renewed strength in their Tegra processor division, which saw growth thanks to their automotive design wins which are now shipping inside Audi’s vehicles. This is combined with Nvidia’s continued strength in their Quadro and Tesla business which has continually buoyed the company’s profitability for the past few years and appears to continue to do so, but to a lesser degree this quarter. Overall revenue was up 16% year over year, meaning that Nvidia continues to improve their strength especially with their high-end products where they saw growth as high as 50%. And even though notebook sales and volumes went down, Nvidia still saw growth in their side of the business, selling the dedicated GPU.

The good thing for Nvidia is that they’ve diversified the placement of their Tegra business with smartphones, tablets and automotive. For their competitors, who are more mobile-heavy, they are experiencing much better growth in their mobile business because of their exposure in automotive in addition to tablets and smartphones. Even though, realistically, Nvidia is still needing a lot of help with their smartphone design wins when compared to their competitors. Perhaps, with Tegra K1 they will get much better pull with Tegra than they did with the Tegra 4 SoC.

Nvidia’s outlook for the next quarter are effectively flat in Q2, in terms of both revenue and operating expenses. As a result of today’s announcements and the company’s outlook, the shares of NVDA are actually trading down 3%, which is disappointing considering the fact that their outlook isn’t necessarily bad and they weren’t necessarily doing poorly.

The post Nvidia Reports Strong 1Q 2015, Following Error appeared first on VR World.

Someone inside of Nvidia’s [NASDAQ:NVDA] investor relations is probably having a really bad day today, following yesterday’s mistake regarding their earnings release where they mistakenly released the company’s preliminary earnings release internally to a group of 100 people, which potentially violates regulations set forth by the SEC that require any knowledge of earnings to be made public immediately if there is a possibility of that information going public. In order to be compliant, Nvidia wanted to prevent any of this preliminary earnings knowledge from reaching people before it reached the public. Nvidia did not actually email anyone outside of the company prior to a public release, but since I assume many of these people were outside of the financial structure of Nvidia they were forced to go public with the information that had been made known internally. While we don’t know who was responsible for yesterday’s earnings cockup, there’s no doubt that this is a HUGE mistake for a major semiconductor company and there will be a lot of questions asked once Nvidia releases their full earnings tomorrow along with an earnings call which may explain what happened, exactly.

In terms of Nvidia’s earnings themselves, the company reported for their fiscal first quarter of 2015, which is actually the first calendar quarter of 2014, earnings of $136 million on $1.1 billion in revenue, which is down sequentially from the fourth quarter where Nvidia is traditionally their strongest. As a result, it is expected to see that their revenue was down 4% quarter over quarter and profit down the same amount. In fact, it is actually really good to only take a 4% quarter over quarter reduction from your strongest quarter, most companies generally see a much larger decrease because of how big their third and fourth quarters are for their business. So, then, it comes as no surprise that when compared to the same quarter a year ago, Nvidia was actually up 16% in terms of revenue ($954 million last year vs. $1,102 this year) and 85% in terms of profitability, which is HUGE. Nvidia took in $77.9 million in profit in their first quarter last year, compared to $136 million this year which accounts for the 85% GAAP increase. Now, if you look at their non-GAAP EPS, then you’ll see that it is a slightly more moderated 61% increase, but even so, it indicates Nvidia is strong as ever, even with a fairly weak Tegra business.

GAAP EPS were $0.24, up 85% from $0.13 a year ago and down 4% from $0.25 in the previous quarter, and non-GAAP earnings were $0.29, up 61% from $0.18 and down 9% from $0.32 in the previous quarter. Nvidia also saw their gross margin grow to 54.8 % from the previous quarter’s 54.1 % to the same quarter a year ago’s 54.3.

Nvidia stated, “This press release is being issued because a preliminary draft of the company’s financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2015 was inadvertently emailed to an internal distribution list of about 100 individuals. Because of this error, these results are being provided to the market in advance of trading in NVIDIA stock today as a precaution.”

While we do not yet have the CFO commentary or any information from the earnings call since neither have actually happened yet, we will have to leave our analysis of Nvidia’s individual business units until those happen or are released. NVIDIA will provide its full results for the first quarter, along with additional commentary and a financial outlook, on Thursday, May 8, 2014, as initially scheduled. Perhaps, then, Nvidia’s stock will do a little better even though yesterday’s preliminary mistaken release pretty much beat most people’s expectations and drove t stock up about 1% during trading. However, the stock gave up most of that over the course of the trading day yesterday and only earned back a few pennies today. Such has been the case for Nvidia’s stock in the past and perhaps tomorrow’s earnings call and full earnings release and outlook will help the stock to finally break $20 for the first time in over 3 years.

The post Nvidia Mistakenly Announces Quarterly Earnings, Full Report Tomorrow appeared first on VR World.

AMD’s earnings broken down by revenue per division also spoke to how the company was able to beat the street’s expectations.

Computing Solutions: In their Computing Solutions business, which primarily focuses on CPUs and chipsets, AMD saw a decline of 8% quarter over quarter and 12% year over year, indicating that the PC market did shrink overall year over year, but an 8% decrease sequentially is almost to be expected going from the company’s busiest quarter (as was the case with Intel). They managed to post an operating loss of $3 million rather than an operating loss of $7 million in the previous quarter, primarily driven by lower operating expenses. This is compared to an operating loss of $39 million in the same period a year ago, clearly indicating AMD’s ability to adjust, slowly. Additionally, their CPU ASP remained flat sequentially but down ‘slightly’ year over year (no percentage provided).

Graphics and Visual Solutions: In AMD’s Graphics and Visual solutions division, which includes console APUs, AMD saw their revenue in the first quarter of 2014 decrease 15% sequentially and increase 118% year over year. This is clearly being driven by their ‘semi-custom’ SoC business and their GPU business which saw revenue increase both sequentially and year over year, indicating AMD’s thirst to improve their graphics strength. They reported that GPU sales were improved due to strong demand for their AMD Radeon R7 and R9 series of graphics cards. However, AMD still has a lot of room for improvement here with most of the GPU marketshare still being in Nvidia’s hands. Additionally, it appears as though the Xbox One’s slow-down in sales may have been the biggest factor in this change from quarter to quarter as Sony’s PlayStation 4 sales are strong as ever.

AMD also reported stronger operating income with an operating income of $91 million, compared to $121 million in Q4 2013, however, when compared to the same quarter a year ago at $16 million, AMD looks to be doing much better. The sequential decline was blamed by AMD on decreased revenue from ‘semi-custom’ SoCs while the year over year increase was also driven by higher sales of ‘semi-custom’ SoCs, basically consoles drove sales very strongly.

AMD’s outlook for 2014 was also a bit rosier than expected as they did report that they expected to see revenue for 2014 to increase year over year and that they expected their gross margin to remain around 35% which is exactly where they reported it for this quarter. Based on these slightly better than expected earnings, improved outlook and GPU sales strength, AMD’s stock is currently up 6% in after hours trading, clearly indicating investors’ happiness with this quarter’s earnings.

The post AMD Reports Expected Improvement in Q1 2014 Earnings appeared first on VR World.

Intel’s first quarter earnings for 2014 were for the most part fairly tepid. Sure, they were able to post an earnings of $0.38 per share on $12.8 billion in revenue, however this only beat analyst’s fairly conservative expectations of $0.37 per share by $0.01. On $12.8 billion in revenue, Intel showed operating income of $2.5 billion and net income of $1.9 billion. Intel’s net income for Q1 2014 was down 5% over the same period a year ago, nothing to cheer about but still much better than previous declines. They also saw an increase in revenue of about $200 million, even though there was a slight decrease in profitability of about the same amount.

The truth is that Intel’s performance this past quarter was not anything especially exciting write about. The most exciting thing for most, however, was the fact that Intel was essentially flat. To many, that came as an indication of their stemming the tide of PC declines and growth in enterprise and server. Also, remember, that before this earnings report, Intel changed how they report their revenue for certain divisions based on new product groups. So now things are categorized under the following 5 categories:

• PC Client Group revenue of $7.9 billion, down 8 percent sequentially and down 1 percent year-over-year.
• Data Center Group revenue of $3.1 billion, down 5 percent sequentially and up 11 percent year-over-year.
• Internet of Things Group revenue of $482 million, down 10 percent sequentially and up 32 percent year-over-year.
• Mobile and Communications Group revenue of $156 million, down 52 percent sequentially and down 61 percent year-over-year.
• Software and services operating segments revenue of $553 million, down 6 percent sequentially and up 6 percent year-over-year.

If you look at their new break down of revenue (and profitability) per division, you can see that their PC Client Group is still the bulk of the company’s revenue followed closely by the Data Center Group. All of the others are still relatively at around $500 million or less in terms of revenue, and even less in terms of profitability towards Intel’s bottom line.

But if Intel wants to become a truly competitive company in the mobile space their Mobile and Communications Group is going to need to grow much faster rather than shrinking 52% sequentially and 61% year over year. Not just that, but at $156 million this is actually their smallest business segment which is a bit concerning when you think about how important Mobile and Communications are to Intel’s future.

Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich said about their earnings, “In the first quarter we saw solid growth in the data center, signs of improvement in the PC business, and we shipped 5 million tablet processors, making strong progress on our goal of 40 million tablets for 2014. Additionally, we demonstrated our further commitment to grow in the enterprise with a strategic technology and business collaboration with Cloudera, we introduced our second-generation LTE platform with CAT6 and other advanced features, and we shipped our first Quark products for the Internet of Things.”

The truth is that Intel is buying their tablet share and it remains to be seen if that 40 million tablets for 2014 goal is really going to be worth it for Intel to effectively eat the profitability for the sake of penetration. Their lack of communications penetration is their biggest weakness and I’m not entirely sure it was a good idea for Intel to commit an entire division to IoT solutions without a solid definition for IoT even existing yet. There is no doubt that Intel is gungho on growth and expanding their product lines, but the real question is whether or not they can help reinvent the PC in ways that make it relevant while also making sure they are a serious player in the mobile computing AND communications front. Sure, they’ve landed themselves inside some of the Samsung Galaxy S5 phones, but their lack of consistent design wins is concerning to say the least. Qualcomm needs a serious and stable competitor and I’m not entirely convinced that Intel is there yet.

Since their earnings announcement, Intel is basically flat (was up 0.60% yesterday and gave up 0.40% over night).

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