Sony Pictures Planning Release for Moon

Word out of Sundance last night is that Sony Pictures Classics is taking over distribution duties on Moon starring Sam Rockwell. Sony picked up the film long before its debut at Sundance last week. The specialty division of the studio is looking at a June release.
ShockTillYouDrop.com's review is in for the sci-fi thriller, you can read it here, or, visit this spot to preview five clips.
Directed by Duncan Jones, the film follows an astronaut on a three-year mission to mine an energy source from the moon until his daily routine is interrupted by something peculiar.

 

Source : http://www.shocktillyoudrop.com/

Will Sony Have What It Takes to Produce a Successful Playstation 4?

This is massive news. As recently as October Sony (SNE) were predicting a profit, now they have made their first loss in 14 years. Already they have an austerity programme in place with company wide redundancies. And their cash shortage has forced them to raise new capital in the middle east and to sell off parts of the company.

Two bits of Sony are in especial trouble, their mobile phone joint venture with Ericsson (ERIC), which has seen a 23% sales slump, and their Playstation division. From being runaway leader in the last console generation Sony are now running third and last in this generation with nothing in sight that could improve matters. Some analysts have said that the Playstation PS3 losses are so great that they have more than canceled out the previous profits made by earlier Playstation models.

Sony are in trouble because they have no big, successful product differentiators. In fact, for much of what they make you can buy a better equivalent for less money. The Xbox 360 is a prime example and many consumer electronic items from Samsung and LG are further examples. The high value of the Japanese yen is making this even worse.

There will now be a massive restructuring at Sony. It is a matter of survival. They need to find a way back to giving customers what they want, to innovating and to running the business more commercially. Things are so bad that you must wonder whether they have the will and resources necessary to produce the Playstation 4.

 

Source : http://seekingalpha.com/

Intel’s Layoffs and Dividends

On Wednesday, January 21, Intel announced that it was halting production at five factories, including Fab 20 in Oregon. “The actions” it said, “when combined with associated support functions, are expected to affect between 5,000 and 6,000 employees worldwide.” In Oregon, 1,000 Intel employees will be “affected” according to news reports.

So, even though Oregon changed its corporate income tax so that Intel is probably now paying just $10 a year (Intel used to pay $50 million a year and was Oregon’s top corporate taxpayer), Intel is now closing a facility here and not in other states that still better tax Intel by apportioning Intel’s profits by considering more than just sales.

Intel’s decision to close one facility in Oregon and not in a state with higher corporate income taxes demonstrates businesses will do what the fundamental economics of their businesses demand and that Oregon’s efforts to alter those decisions by cutting precious tax revenues has been a fool's game. Taxes don’t matter; other factors do.

And while some politicians, lobbyists and editorial writers will point to the layoffs at Intel to argue “now’s not the time” to restore the income tax on corporate profits, BlueOregon readers shouldn’t be so easily led astray by the layoffs.

Two days after the layoff announcement, Intel announced a quarterly tax dividend of 14 cents per share. With about 5 billion shares of common stock outstanding, that’s not chump change.

There’s no reason Oregon’s income tax on profits shouldn’t be fixed so that Intel could once again proudly proclaim itself our best corporate income taxpayer. Unfortunately, the Governor’s plan for changes in the corporate income tax would preserve Intel’s status as just another corporate minimum tax taxpayer. I’d like to see the legislature enact a corporate tax structure that allows Intel to boast again that it is number one.

 

Source : http://www.blueoregon.com/

Nokia Siemens to fire some 180 employees in Israel

Nokia Siemens will fire 40% of its employees in Israel – some 180 out of the company's 460 workers. The decision came following forecasts of a 5% drop in the company's sales.

This is the company's second round of lay-offs, after firing 50 employees from its development center in Hod Hasharon in July.

Most of the lay-offs in the previous round were from the former Seabridge company that was acquired by Nokia Siemens.

The acquisition of Seabridge was part of the company's business strategy to launch an Ethernet-based optical urban communications network.

On Thursday Ynet learned that there would be more lay-offs in the Atrica company, Nokia Siemens' most recent acquisition in Israel, that develops the next generation of optical communications networks.

The global communications market has suffered a fatal blow in recent days, with the collapse of Nortel and mass lay-offs in Erikson and Motorola.

Another Israeli company that develops Ethernet technology is Actelis Networks, that has also fire 20 employees in Israel and abroad in recent days.

Nokia Siemens said in response to the report, "The company does not respond to rumors or speculations."

 

Source : http://www.ynetnews.com

Review of Last Week's Tech Earnings

After the outstanding earnings report from IBM (NYSE: IBM) earlier this week, I suggested that Google (GOOG) would also beat analyst expectations. It did.
Revenues of $5.70 billion were 18% higher than the same quarter of 2007, and a 3% sequential improvement over Q3 2008. Adjusted earnings for the quarter were reported at $5.10 per share versus expectations of $4.95. (Call Transcript , Q&A Transcript)
Looking deeper into the performance metrics reported, indeed Google seems to be benefiting from the flight to safety by marketing budgets, along with its increasingly international footprint.

Aggregate paid clicks increased 18% over Q4 2007, and 10% sequentially. Revenue from Google owned sites, essentially search, increased by 22% over Q4 2007. AdSense revenues grew by 4%. Revenues from international sources increased as percentage of total sales to 50% from 48%.

Google management chose to take some impairment charges in the quarter, which impacted negatively on reported earnings. However, operationally, it could be inferred that Google performed ahead of expectations. As I expected.

Investors should marvel at the margins of this Company which was reported at 33% in the 4th quarter, which is a 10% improvement sequentially over Q3. It should be interesting to see what happens during Q1 2009, which is typically the weakest quarter for media spending. Notwithstanding, Google should continue to benefit from the "flight to safety" for at least two more quarters.

More surprising this week was the strong earnings report from Apple (AAPL) (Call Transcript). Although iPhone sales were weak as expected, strong performance from the laptop line of business was a big surprise. As a premium priced product in a declining market, one could predict that this business would crater during the quarter, but instead it powered earnings. International sales again helped push iPod performance ahead of forecasts. Essentially, Apple's diversified product base was critical to its surprise performance.

On the other hand, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) showed a deep decline in performance due to weak handset replacement activities worldwide (Call Transcript). As I have stated in an earlier post, people find their mobile subscriptions to be essential, but are choosing to hold off on fancier phone upgrades. On top of that, for consumers actually looking for new bling, they are choosing the iPhone over Nokia products in Europe.

Because Research In Motion (RIMM) looks more like Nokia than Apple from a product perspective, there is probably a greater chance than not that RIM could miss analyst expectations when it reports. However, it was reported during the fall of 2007 that shipments of Storm were better than expected. Unlike Nokia, RIM has been launching new devices throughout 2008, which should benefit performance. However, with iPhone being Apple's weakest product line, and Nokia reporting significant declines in sales, it doesn't bode well for RIM's quarter.

Because Yahoo! (YHOO-Q) has a greater exposure to the U.S market than Google, and because it relies more on impression-based display ad revenue than Google, it could report earnings next week that miss expectations. Management instability, and the erosion of brand equity by incessant takeover speculation do not help, either.

Marketers probably do not feel as safe allocating budgets to Yahoo! as compared to Google. Social media players like Facebook and MySpace are a direct susbstitutes for Yahoo!'s portal business, and are nipping at the edges of Yahoo!'s traffic while gaining more mindshare with marketers, which also does not help. If the dominant online media player is showing 18% growth in sales in a market where total growth is forecasted to be around 10%, the performance gaps need to occur somewhere.

 

Source : http://seekingalpha.com/

AMD official: Chip plant plans on track despite money woes

Advanced Micro Devices’ plans to build a $4.5 billion chip manufacturing plant in Malta are on track, despite a huge decline in revenue, a company spokesman said.
AMD released its 2008 year-end report last week, revealing a 35 percent decrease in revenue of compared to the third quarter.
“The global economic conditions have led to a real softening of the demand,” said Travis Bullard, the corporate public relations manager for the company.

Bullard and other company officials emphasized the new direction of the company.
“Although industry visibility is poor, our priorities remain clear and achievable,” said Dirk Meyer, AMD’s president and CEO, in a statement to the press. “We remain focused on further reducing our break even point through targeted restructuring actions while ensuring we execute our highly-competitive product and technology roadmaps. We made significant progress toward the creation of ‘The Foundry Company’ in the quarter, and anticipate closing the transaction in February. We expect our ongoing restructuring actions and asset smart strategy, combined with the strength of our innovative product offerings, will leave us well positioned for a global market recovery.”
The restructuring of AMD has been centered on returning the company to its core business and divesting itself of some of its other businesses, Bullard said. In an agreement reached earlier this week, the company sold the basis of its handheld business including certain graphics and multimedia technology assets, intellectual property and resources to Qualcomm Incorporated.
In addition to the restructuring, AMD has instituted cost-cutting measures such as temporary pay cuts for executives and employees, as well as reducing its staff.
On Jan. 16, AMD announced plans to cut 1,100 jobs, 9 percent of its global staff.
Bullard said the last condition to be met before closing the deal to build the Malta facility is shareholders’ approval of the plan, which is expected in February. Shareholders will cast votes in person at a Feb. 10 meeting in Austin, Texas, or by proxy.
Fourth quarter 2008 gross margin was 23 percent, including a negative impact of 20 percentage points due to a $227 million incremental write down of inventory, which was attributed to weak market conditions.
For the year ending Dec. 27, 2008, AMD achieved revenue of $5.808 billion compared to a reported revenue of $5.858 billion for fiscal year 2007. In the fourth quarter of 2008, AMD reported a net loss of $1.4 billion or $2.34 per share. The fourth quarter loss for continuing operations was $1.414 billion with the operating loss reported as $1.274 billion. The loss from discontinued operations was $10 million.

 

Source : http://www.troyrecord.com/