Blackberry ASP Takes a Nosedive
RIM just reported earnings for its first calendar quarter of 2012. 68 percent of its $4.2 billion in revenue came from the sale of hardware, which includes both Blackberrys and Playbooks. That means RIM brought in $2.85 billion from hardware sales.
Assuming that each Playbook sells for, on average, $250, then RIM took in $2.73 billion from Blackberry sales. Divide that number by the 11.1 million Blackberrys RIM sold and you get an average selling price of $246.04. That compares to $285.45 in the previous quarter, and $278.79 in the quarter before that one.
Though the average selling price of a Blackberry has been very volatile over the last year, an almost $40 drop in ASP in one quarter is unprecedented. My data goes back to 2007, and I couldn’t find anything like it. ASP dropped by more than 13 percent in 90 days.
The chart below illustrates just how bad it’s gotten:
How much longer will RIM survive?
TweetRIM Begins Laying off High-Level Staff
Iain Marlow at The Globe and Mail:
Ahead of RIM reporting fourth-quarter and year-end financial results on Thursday after markets close, a source with knowledge of Mr. Heins’ actions said RIM executives at the senior vice-president and vice-president levels had been told they no longer had jobs on Thursday.
Wow.
IDC Predicts Apple Will Sell 318 Million iOS Devices in 2016
Apple will easily hit that number in 2013.
Harvard Schmarvard
The main question for me is whether or not Apple will succeed in building a walled garden for everything new that breaks out of the old 1080p mold.
The main question for me is why this blog post is titled “Why the new iPad screen is the future of display [sic]” when the content of the post has nothing to do with its title.
Why You Should Buy Stock in ARM
Tony Daltorio at The Motley Fool:
Telecom equipment company Ericsson ADRrecently forecast that there would be roughly 50 billion connected devices by 2020, up from just 5 billion in 2010. And ARM chips are likely to be in most of them.
Apple Could be Top Mobile Processor Maker by End of 2012
Apple started making mobile processors a little more than two years ago.
Apple Announces Plans to Initiate Dividend and Share Repurchase Program
Apple:
“Combining dividends, share repurchases, and cash used to net-share-settle vesting RSUs, we anticipate utilizing approximately $45 billion of domestic cash in the first three years of our programs,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “We are extremely confident in our future and see tremendous opportunities ahead.”
That may seem like a lot, but it’s not. Apple made $13 billion last quarter, and will probably make at least $10 billion this quarter. For a company that currently pulls in more than $10 billion per quarter and whose profits double annually, $45 billion over three years is nothing. Apple may well be making that much every quarter three years from now.
Apple Stock Seen Hitting $718 on Sales of 60M iPads, 134M iPhones in 2012
From the department of too-high-to-do-basic-math:
As for the iPhone, [Gene] Munster’s models call for Apple to sell 134 million units this year, up from the 93.1 million the company sold in 2011.
Apple has sold more iPhones every year than in every previous year combined, yet Munster thinks Apple won’t sell even 50 percent more iPhones in 2012 than it did in 2011.
Did he even look at the numbers before making this prediction?
Five Tablets That Go Where the New iPad Doesn’t
First of all, the fifth tablet mentioned is the iPad 2. And if you exclude the iPad 2, I’d be willing to bet a lot of money — a lot of freakin’ money —that the other four tablets combined won’t sell even half as well all year as the new iPad does the quarter after it’s launched.
Please pass me some of what this guy is smoking.
