As PCs decline, it’s Apple that’s making real money from PCs
Apple doesn't even make the list of top five sellers of PCs in the world (though it is No. 5 in the United States), but some number crunching by Asymco's Horace Dediu shows a surprising fact: Apple earns 45 percent of the operating profits in the PC industry. The top five sellers -- Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, and Acer -- together make only 33 percent of operating profit. (Operating profit is the cash the companies keep after all expenses, including day-to-day operational costs, are paid for.) Read more...
Apple’s squeeze hits phone companies, competitors
Apple is set to report another record quarterly profit on Tuesday, continuing the relentless string of results that's made it the world's most valuable company. Those profits don't come out of thin air: A range of businesses —from the company's wireless carrier friends to its PC-making foes— are seeing their profits melt away and flow to Apple's bottom line.
Apple's success is good for the U.S. economy, and some businesses, like software developers and memory-chip makers, have benefited from the disruption Apple is causing. But its enormous gains have resulted in others' pains, sometimes in unexpected places.
—AT&T Inc., for instance, took a chance on Apple's unproven phone in 2007, but the company might be regretting that decision. Since it became the first U.S. phone company to carry the iPhone, its stock is down 25 percent. Apple's is up 415 percent. Read more...
SAP reports its best year ever
SAP said Wednesday that it had exceeded its guidance for revenue and profit in 2011, its best year in its 40-year history, and was positioned to exceed its revenue target of €20 billion ($26 billion) in 2015.
The company said it expects full-year 2012 non-IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) software and software-related service revenue to grow in the range of 10 to 12 percent at constant currencies, with its proposed acquisition of SuccessFactors contributing up to two percentage points.
SAP said it had significant momentum going into 2012.
The $3.4 billion acquisition of SuccessFactors, announced in December, will bring to SAP a range of cloud-based human resources software as well as expertise in the cloud market. The company expects to close the transaction in the first quarter. Read more...
Oracle’s net rises 36 percent, but servers slip
Stronger spending on business software helped Oracle Corp.'s quarterly profit jump 36 percent, but the company's server business further deteriorated, a decline Oracle attributed to its move to shed lower-margin deals.
The company said after the stock market closed Tuesday that its net income rose to $1.84 billion, or 36 cents per share, in the quarter that ended Aug. 31. That compared with $1.35 billion, or 27 cents per share, a year earlier.
Its adjusted net income for the latest quarter was 48 cents per share, a penny higher than the average forecast of analysts polled by FactSet.
Revenue rose 12 percent to $8.37 billion, slightly exceeding the $8.36 billion that analysts expected. Read more...
iPad, iPhone boost Apple’s Q3 profits
Apple reported solid earnings for its fiscal third quarter, with strong iPad and iPhone shipments boosting profit and revenue, the company said Tuesday.
Apple sold 9.25 million iPads in the quarter, a 183 percent increase from the same quarter last year. It sold 20.34 million iPhones, a 142 percent increase. IPod sales were down 20 percent to 7.54 million units, however.
The iPad 2 went on sale in March to big lines in the U.S., and while initial stocks dried up quickly, demand remained strong. Read more...
Ballmer’s new chant: Numbers, numbers, numbers
Microsoft lost its title as the world's biggest tech company this year with Apple surging ahead in market cap, profit and revenue.
Yet Microsoft still has ammo in the numbers department to take shots at its biggest rival, and many others, besides.
CEO Steve Ballmer focused heavily on numbers proving rapid adoption of Microsoft technology -- with the exception of Windows Phone 7 -- on Monday as the company's Worldwide Partner Conference kicked off in Los Angeles.
Windows 7 has sold 400 million licenses in less than two years, Office 2010 has sold more than 100 million licenses, 50,000 businesses have trialed Office 365 since the cloud service's launch two weeks ago, Windows Server locked up 75% of quarterly hardware shipments, and usage of the Bing search engine has tripled in the past year. Read more...