China and Russia Shore up Ericsson

Ericsson said its sales rose 4% year-on-year on an organic basis in the fourth quarter to 67 billion Swedish krona (10.27 billion US dollars). That uplift was driven by strong mobile broadband sales in China and Russia, together with a new IPR agreement with Samsung, Ericsson reported. However, the Stockholm-based group also reported "lower project activity in Japan and North America." source: Ericsson presentation

Mobile Ads Keep Facebook Flying High

Facebook reported a 63% year-on-year rise in revenue in the fourth quarter to 2.59 billion U.S. dollars, fuelled by a dramatic rise in mobile advertising. The social network said mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 53% of advertising revenue for the fourth quarter of 2013, up from approximately 23% a year earlier.

Facebook also reported a 22% increase in "daily active users" to an average of 757 million for December 2013. Facebook spent 1.37 billion dollars on capex in 2013 - 17% of revenue. source: Facebook statement

AT&T Sees Slow Growth Ahead

AT&T, the largest telco in the U.S., said it expects its consolidated revenues to rise between 2% and 3% in 2014 (before any impact from the planned acquisition of Leap Wireless). In the fourth quarter of 2013, AT&T's revenues rose 1.8% year on year to 33.2 billion dollars - still ahead of faster-growing arch-rival Verizon (31.1 billion dollars). AT&T's growth was driven in large part by rising wireless data revenues, which leapt 16.8%.

AT&T also forecast that its capex will be stable in 2014 at about 21 billion dollars - 16% of the 128.8 billion dollars in revenue it generated in 2013. source: AT&T statement

Apple Predicts Sluggish Quarter

Apple said its revenues rose 6% year-on-year in the quarter ending December 28th to 57.59 billion US dollars. The rise was fuelled by a 6% increase in iPhone revenues and a 7% rise in iPad revenues. Sales of software, digital content and services were strong, up 19% to 4.4 billion dollars.

Apple forecast its revenue will be between 42 billion and 44 billion dollars in the current quarter. That compares with 43.6 billion dollars in the equivalent quarter of 2012.  source: Apple statement

Samsung Ships One in Four Handsets

source: IDC statement

Samsung Sees Sharp Slowdown

Samsung Electronics reported a 10% year-on-year rise in sales in its IT and mobile communications division to 33.89 trillion Korean won (31.17 billion US dollars) in the fourth quarter. That represents a marked slowdown on previous quarters - across 2013, sales were up 31% to 138.82 trillion won.

Samsung said that it expects demand for smartphones to continue to grow in 2014 with "LTE service expansion in Europe/China and solid demand growth in emerging markets." In the tablet market, it forecast "intensified price competition, amid continued rapid growth in developed and emerging markets." source: Samsung presentation

Nokia Has Another Tough Quarter

Nokia reported a 29% year-on-year fall in revenues in its mobile devices division, which it is selling to Microsoft, in the fourth quarter to 2.63 billion euros. Nokia said the fall was primarily due to "lower mobile phones net sales and, to a lesser extent, lower smart devices net sales. Our mobile phones net sales were affected by competitive industry dynamics, including intense smartphone competition at increasingly lower price points and intense competition at the low end of our product portfolio. Our smart devices net sales were affected by competitive industry dynamics including the strong momentum of competing smartphone platforms, as well as our portfolio transition from Symbian products to Lumia products."  

Nokia also said sales in its networks division, NSN, fell 22% year-on-year in the fourth quarter, partly because of "divestments of businesses not consistent with its strategic focus, as well as the exiting of certain customer contracts and countries. Excluding these two factors, NSN net sales in the fourth quarter 2013 declined by approximately 15% primarily due to reduced wireless infrastructure deployment activity...Additionally, NSN net sales were negatively affected by foreign currency fluctuations." source: Nokia statement 

Verizon's Growth Slows Slightly

Verizon, one of the big two U.S. telcos, said its operating revenues rose 3.4% year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2013 to 31.1 billion U.S. dollars. That was slightly down on the 4.1% annual revenue growth to 120.55 billion dollars in 2013. Still, wireless service revenue climbed 8% in the quarter to 17.7 billion dollars, aided by growing uptake of LTE.

Verizon said it activated a further nine million LTE devices during the quarter taking the total number of LTE devices on its network to more than 42 million. It also reported that its capital spending in 2013 was 16.6 billion dollars, up slightly on the 16.2 billion dollars in 2012. source: Verizon presentation 

Devices and Telecom Services Struggle in 2013

Research firm Gartner said spending on devices (including PCs, ultramobiles, mobile phones and tablets) contracted 1.2% to 669 billion U.S. dollars in 2013, while the global market for IT services grew 1.8% to 922 billion dollars. The telecoms services market shrank by 0.5% in 2013 to 1.63 trillion dollars, according to the research firm.

Gartner lowered its forecast for overall IT spending growth in 2014 to 3.1% from the 3.6% it forecast at the end of the third quarter 2013. "A downward revision of the 2014 forecast growth in spending for telecom services — a segment that accounts for more than 40% of total IT spending — from 1.9% to 1.2% is the main reason behind this overall IT spending growth reduction," said Richard Gordon, managing vice president at Gartner  "A number of factors are involved, including the faster-than-expected growth of wireless-only households, declining voice rates in China and a more frugal usage pattern among European customers. The latter coincides in Western Europe with a breakout of fierce price competition among communications service providers to retain customers and attract new ones." source: Gartner statement

Apple App Store Generates $10 billion in 2013

Apple said that consumers spent over 10 billion U.S. dollars in its App Store in 2013, including more than 1 billion dollars in December alone. The Cupertino-based company added that "App Store customers downloaded almost three billion apps in December making it the most successful month in App Store history." Apple also said developers have now earned 15 billion dollars on the App Store. source: Apple statement