iPhone Give 55% Margin Say iSupply: Apple Share Rise

iPhone Give 55% Margin Say iSupply: Apple Share RiseiSupply did one of their usual Teardown’s on the Apple iPhone, estimating that they are on a 55% margin for each 8Gb phone that they sell.

The Teardown involves taking new consumer devices apart, as soon as they’re released, and working out how much they cost manufacturers to build and therefore how much profit – or loss – the sale of each device brings.

Such is the influence of iSupply these days, the news of the very healthy margin appeared to cause a rise in the value of Apple’s shares, up 4.9%.

The bill of materials and manufacturing costs totalled $265.83, with the iPhone selling for $599.

Given the close-to-lunatic media coverage (you’ll have noticed that we’ve been rather restrained, if not a little dismissive of the madness), we suspect that there’ll be triples all around at Apple’s 1 Infinite Loop office and some big celebrations over the 4 July holiday in the US today.

iSupply

Nintendo Valuation Higher Than Sony! (briefly)

Nintendo Valuation Higher Than Sony! (briefly)Nintendo’s stock market valuation was briefly higher than Sony’s on the Osaka Stock Exchange this morning.

The combination of a record high for Nintendo’s share price and a drop for Sony lead to the strange situation.

Nintendo’s revenue is eight times smaller than Sony – not surprising when Sony’s empire spans so many different areas including, TV, music and film publishing.
Continue reading Nintendo Valuation Higher Than Sony! (briefly)

IPTV Growth To Boost Video Market To $277Bn By 2010: iSupply

IPTV Growth To Boost Video Market To $277Bn By 2010: iSupplyResearch house iSupply are predicting that IPTV will be boosting the reveneue generated by the premium video services market from its current level of less than $200Bn to a whopping $277Bn by 2010.

Their definition of the premium video services market takes in pay-TV, mobile video, DVD, broadband video and theatre/box office receipts, but when advertising revenues are added, the total market reaches a stunning $370Bn.

iSupply see IPTV growing at frankly amazing rates. In 2005 they saw IPTV worth $681m and, with their estimate of a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 103 percent (!), see it reaching a calculator-busting £23.5Bn in 2010.

It appears that they see the public’s willingness to pay for content expanding significantly. Strange, but we and our other tech-aware pals are finding ourselves just not watching that much mainstream content – even if it is available on-demand.

IPTV Growth To Boost Video Market To $277Bn By 2010: iSupplyThat aside, iSupply see the battle royal between two big, hairy beasts – the current pay-TV world of direct-to-home satellite and digital and analogue cable TV services – and the telcos who will be pushing quad-play.

On the physical format side, iSupply point out that DVD sales are slowing, and will continue to do so, with the decline over the next 3-4 years being as much as 15 percent to 20 percent.

One very interesting point that is raised by them is

With most movie libraries and television series already on DVD, Hollywood studios are generating more than half of their revenues from DVDs—and are running out of new content to sell, making this an issue of paramount importance to them. One cause of the DVD sales deceleration is the fact that consumers have become more price-sensitive, believing that the average DVD cost of $20 is too expensive, especially compared to renting.

It’s not clear where this leaves Blu-Ray and HD-DVD – both on the price of the media (which is expected to be higher than DVD) and on the material that is available. Given Hollywood’s slow ability to make new material, and that most of it will have been sold on DVD already – it’s not clear if the new formats will help them.

Information on Premium Video Services Market report

Apple Grows iPod Sales

Apple Grows iPod SalesApple has continued to increase the number of iPods they’re selling. Their latest quarterly results show that they grown the 8.11m iPods they sold in the previous quarter to 8.73m this quarter, beyond market expectations. The quarter that is reporting didn’t change or introduce any new iPods.

The number of computers they sold has also increased 30 percent from the same quarter in the previous year to 1.61m. We’re slightly surprised that this figure wasn’t higher, given that the latest quarter included the switch to the Intel processor, which has given a considerable increase in the speed.

Jobs enthused, “Selling more than 39 million iPods and 5.3 million Macs while performing an incredibly complex architecture transition is something we are all very proud of.”

Overall, the company posted revenues of $4.84Bn, and a net quarterly profit of $546m.

Sky Results: Long-Term Concerns?

Sky Results: Long-Term Concerns? BSkyB results for the last year were broadly in line with predictions, but seasoned watchers of all things financial, recognise tell-tale signs of a flattening of the growth curve. The company has managed its spend on programming well, but technology costs remain high, with significant outgoings on expensive High Definition equipment, that won’t bring instant revenue returns.

Sky, as the company brands itself in the UK, looks increasingly like a utility platform-come-broadband wars‘ that are unlikely to see any great financial gains for those taking part.

As Telcos have become drawn into offering entertainment packages to make their own offerings ‘sticky bundles’ – that their customers are loathe to detach themselves from – the entertainment companies are forced to provide competing phone and broadband packages, along with the capability of on-demand TV downloads. This won’t be cheap, as Sky has already found to date with its Easynet purchase, and may prove to be more expensive, if they decide to acquire the UK AOL subscribers from Time Warner.

Sky’s average revenue per subscriber (ARPU) has dropped by £4 and along side this they’re facing stiffer competition from Freeview, the UK Digital Terrestrial platform. Freeview now has a free-to-air movie channel (Film 4) and is due to add two further entertainment channels provided by the UK channel ‘Five’ this autumn. Cost-conscious multi-channel homes will continue to gravitate to this low frills platform.

Sky, like pay-TV services worldwide, has a high churn rate, although its managed to reduce this, it remains somewhere over 10% (that’s the percentage of subscribers over the past year who ended their subscriptions). Achieving this has been costly with increased promotional spend and marketing offers to keep current subscribers signed, which has in-turn hit the bottom line.

Sky Results: Long-Term Concerns? James Murdoch the CEO of BSkyB told the corporate world that “Our industry is changing faster than ever before and for Sky, 2006 has been an important and exciting year.”

With the NTL/Telewest /Virgin mobile merger and its re-brand starting to gather traction, it looks like Sky can look forward to even more excitement in 2007.

Google Results: Sales Up 77%, Profits Up 20%

Google Results: Sales Up 77%, Profits Up 20%There’s been tons of financial results coming out around now, but we’ve spared you from them – we’re nice like that. Today we felt it was worth an exception.

Always interested in the growth of Google, we thought we’d bring you details on their second-quarter results.

Climbing ever higher, Google reported revenues of $2.46 billion for the quarter ended 30 June 2006.

Their revenues are broadly split to three areas; from their own sites; from partners sites, and International revenues.

Google sites have increased 94% over the same quarter in 2005, to $1.43 billion. Partner sites brought in $997 million, again up 58% from 2nd quarter 2005. International’s account for 42% of their income, up from 39% from the same quarter last year.

Having a dig through their figures reveals some interesting info – honestly, it is interesting.

Google Results: Sales Up 77%, Profits Up 20%As is well known, one way Google does so well is by getting other sites (partners) to carry their clients advertising for them (of which Digital-lifestyles is one). In accounting-ese/jargon, they refer to it as Traffic Acquisition Costs or TAC. These increased to $785 million, up from $723 million in its first quarter. The TAC (see how quickly you can get into the swing of this jargon) remains at 32% of their advertising revenue, giving a rough understanding that Google take 68% of these ad earnings – pretty healthy in their favour.

The cost of operating their extensive, world-spread data centers and to a lesser extent, processing credit card charges has increased to $204m. That’s a lot of computers, but remains at 8% of revenue.

For a company that ‘doesn’t advertise,’ they’ve been lashing the cash on promotional work, $49m, or which $24m was ‘related to certain distribution deals,’ which we imagine is their deal with browsers like Firefox.

The other little nugget is the amount of wonga they’ve got sitting around. Cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities were sitting at $9.82 billion.

It’s telling, that Microsoft announced fourth-quarter profit declines, with plans to buyback $20Bn of their own stock.

Vodafone Make Record £14.9bn Loss

Vodafone Make Record £14.9bn LossIn the normal world, if you’d just discovered that your business had lost £14.9bn ($27.9bn) in a single year, you’d be blubbering into your laptop or heading to the pub to down a vat of Old Scrote’s Badger ale.

But in the crazy world of uber-corporate business, such a loss – the biggest ever recorded for a UK firm – has been spun around to be grrrreat news, with Reuters reporting that Vodafone has gleefully, “unveiled plans to return an extra 3 billion pounds to shareholders.”

So how does the “the biggest annual loss in European corporate history on write-downs” turn out to be a cash feast for shareholders – who are already looking forward to a slice of the £6bn earmarked after the sale of its Japanese venture?

Well, it’s all down to corporate assets not matching their buying price – in this case, German business Mannesmann, which Vodafone bought for £112bn ($183bn) six years ago.

With the actual income generated by the company not living up to its mighty price tag, Vodafone has shunted the value of the Mannesmann subsidiary downwards on its books – a process known in the hip’n’exciting world of accounting as a write-down.

Conversely, Vodafone has been raking it in recently, scooping in monster £8.8bn operating profits last year, while adding 21 million new customers.

Vodafone Make Record £14.9bn LossIn the white-hot mobile phone segment, Vodafone continues to create growth in key markets such as Germany, Spain and the United States, despite being forced to scuttle out of Japan – selling the business for £8.9bn – after failing to make much of a mark in the country.

Vodafone insists that its business remains fundamentally healthy, despite the whopping losses, with CEO Arun Sarin purring, “Vodafone has met or exceeded expectations, outperforming its competitors in an increasingly challenging marketplace.”

“Vodafone is well positioned to deliver on its strategy,” he continued, thumping the table in a positively aligned, upbeat manner.

Vodafone

Who Will Pay The Price For Google’s Stock Drop?

Who Will Pay The Price For Google's Stock Drop??The tumbrels are resounding for enemies of Google European head, and former T-Mobile boss, Nikesh Arora, following the “disappointing” financial results. In fact, the results were trivially down, but that was enough, and his head will be anxiously sought by Google in the US, say our stray packet interception team.

Your Network Sniffer has discovered that Google insiders are blaming the flop of Web’n’Walk (T-Mobile) and the low-key, reluctant Vodafone contract for making Google the default search engine for phone users. Both contracts, had they been successful, “would have earned the $40m that Arora promised the City he would have,” said one insider.

And what is $40m in the context of Google earnings? “Enough!” is the answer. As a pundit in the Telegraph remarked today: the reason for owning google shares is “it goes up every day” and this is the first time Google has been obliged to report figures below prediction.

Who Will Pay The Price For Google's Stock Drop?And the City doesn’t like people it can’t cut down to size. Give them an excuse, and they will jump on you, which is what happened. That $40m is the excuse they’ve been waiting for. “Misled us with the forecast!”

Why has Nikesh been nominated as scapegoat? Well, apart from the fact that nobody inside Google Europe likes him, it seems that he committed the cardinal sin of not actually telling his US bosses that he was falling short.

“You’d think that a search company could find out what was happening inside its own offices in Europe!” was one quip which, apparently, bit deep. But that appears to be where it all went pear-shaped: instead of saying “I’m going to be $40m short, sack me if you aren’t happy!” to the financial world, Arora didn’t reveal the gap between prediction and reality until the quarterly results came out.

This story originally appeared on NewsWireless, a site read by those who really understand the value of quality journalism.

Homehoice Appoint CSFB To Fund National UK Expansion

Homehoice Appoint CSFB To Fund National UK ExpansionThis morning, Homechoice, the currently London-focused DSL-based VOD announced that they had appointed CSFB (Credit Suisse First Boston, as was) to raise new capital for their expansion around the UK.

Starting 2006, Homechoice plan to expand the number of homes they cover from the current 2.4m homes to over 10m. Homechoice state that this footprint is approaching the same size as that of the combined UK cable companies, which they’re close with, as ntl + Telewest actually have just over 12.6m.

New subscriber figures have also been announced by Homechoice, revealing 34,000, more than double the 15,000 previously disclosed and widely quoted this week when rurmours of Sky being interested buying them were circulating.

Roger Lynch pointed out, “We’re now the fastest growing pay TV service relative to our footprint ,” which, while it’s encouraging, would be expected given they started at such a small number of subscribers.

Homehoice Appoint CSFB To Fund National UK ExpansionTheir newly-announced ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) figures are impressive at £430, being considerably higher than Sky’s £384 (announced in 3 August 2005), but lower than Telewest’s £538 and ntl’s £477 (reported to ofcom, Q2 2005).

Comment
We find it slightly confusing that Homechoice is headlining this news release with their national expansion, which has been a long-stated aim for them and is therefore not news, and not CSFB’s appointment. They’re also putting out a whole lot of figures saying how well they’re doing. We’re not clear if this down to them wanting to make the most of the resent press interested the Sky rurmours have brought or a way of trying to cover that they’re need more money, or just genuine excitement of working the CSFB.

On the financing of the next stage of the roll-out, Lynch explained, “We’ve also reached the stage in our corporate development when we believe it’s right to raise capital from new investors. Hence our decision to appoint CSFB.

This could be read as saying that the current majority backer, Digital Explosion, which is owned by Chris Larsons, a Microsoft co-founder, doesn’t look like it’s prepared to fund the next stage. When we asked Homechoice, their spokesperson said Digital Explosion “Remained committed,” one further probing they wouldn’t be drawn on how much more money, if any they were prepared to invest.

We really hope that Homechoice is successful, we’ve always have been, and continue to be supporters of theirs – for their vision, their progress and their sheer bloody-minded determination to keep going.

Homechoice

Google File For A Further $4Bn

Google File For A Further $4BnThe big news late yesterday was that Google announced a second round share offer – on the first anniversary of their IPO.

In their now-to-be-expected kooky way, their planning to sell 14,159,265 shares, which of course is derived from the value of pi.

At the current valuation for their stock, this would bring in another $4Bn, on top of the approximately $3Bn they have sitting in the bank currently.

Why do they need that money? Is the question on many lips. There’s been many project been floating around with Google’s name attached, among them, becoming a WiFi provider.

S&P analyst Scott Kessler view is that with Microsoft ($37.8 billion in cash) and Yahoo ($3.4 billion) having a ton of cash in the bank, Google needs the money to be able to compete in the global Internet market, in an “arms race” as he puts it.

Acquisitions would appear to be an obvious use of the money. To date Google hasn’t had to spent that much when it’s brought companies in to its fold, as it’s bought them at early stages, but perhaps their future targets are larger now.

Google File For A Further $4BnMary Meeker from Morgan Stanley clearly feels the same, “this cash balance could allow the company increased flexibility to consider large strategic acquisitions.”

Of the names that we’ve heard being knocked around as possible targets for a Google purchase including Tivo and Infospace and a number of Chinese companies.

Interesting extracts from the S-3 filing reveal some areas that they think are threats.

We face significant competition from Microsoft and Yahoo.

We face formidable competition in every aspect of our business, and particularly from other companies that seek to connect people with information on the web and provide them with relevant advertising. Currently, we consider our primary competitors to be Microsoft Corporation and Yahoo! Inc. Microsoft recently introduced a new search engine and has announced plans to develop features that make web search a more integrated part of its Windows operating system or other desktop software products. We expect that Microsoft will increasingly use its financial and engineering resources to compete with us. Both Microsoft and Yahoo have more employees than we do (in Microsoft’s case, currently nearly 14 times as many). Microsoft also has significantly more cash resources than we do. Both of these companies also have longer operating histories and more established relationships with customers and end users. They can use their experience and resources against us in a variety of competitive ways, including by making acquisitions, investing more aggressively in research and development and competing more aggressively for advertisers and web sites. Microsoft and Yahoo also may have a greater ability to attract and retain users than we do because they operate Internet portals with a broad range of content products and services. If Microsoft or Yahoo are successful in providing similar or better web search results compared to ours or leverage their platforms to make their web search services easier to access than ours, we could experience a significant decline in user traffic. Any such decline in traffic could negatively affect our revenues.

Other headline include

We expect our revenue growth rate to decline and anticipate downward pressure on our operating margin in the future.

We rely on our Google Network members for a significant portion of our revenues, and we benefit from our association with them. The loss of these members could adversely affect our business.

New technologies could block our ads, which would harm our business.

Google
Google’s S-3 filing document