92% fall in quarterly profits
Swedish network infrastructure supplier Ericsson has said it will cut an extra 1,500 jobs on top of 2009 targets, as it reported another massive quarterly drop in profits. The company’s planned 5000 head-count reduction for 2009 was exceeded, and is now expected to top 6500.
Net profit for October to December was 314 million kronor (£27m), compared with 3.89 billion kronor (£333m) for the same period in 2008. Ouch.
Hans Vestberg, President and CEO allocates some of the blame to heavily reduced operator spending during the second half of the year. The press release also details restructuring costs, from voice telephony towards mobile broadband, as requiring significant spend by Ericsson.
These latest results were much worse than market forecasts, which expected to see a net profit of 3.23bn kronor.
"You know, the market is weak, but one might have hoped for some recovery in quarter four," said analyst Michael Andersson of Evli Bank. Cold comfort for the employees who probably think Evli Bank contains a transposition error on my part.
Like to know more? press release here
Example of 3D map rendering on Xperia X10
With the success of the movie Avatar, anything with the letters ‘3D’ in it has become more desirable. One of the first mobile examples of this key technology theme for 2010 is shown off here by Ericsson Labs. An application programming interface (API) and software development kit (SDK) to allow easy 3D rendering of maps and landscapes.
You can ignore the nerd speak and watch the video, the speed stays above 30 frames/second and demonstrates how great it is to have a phone powered by a 1Ghz Snapdragon processor.
The Xperia X10 arrives on shelves in early February, and now I want one even more. Perhaps I’m fickle?
4G Viking expansion
This week Scandinavian giant TeliaSonera launched the worlds first publicly available 4G in Norway and Sweden. For now, capital dwellers in Oslo and Stockholm have to manually swap Samsung dongles to switch up to 4G, but TS are promising free upgrades to early adopters when dual devices come out.
Ericsson is supplying the infrastructure in Stockholm, while China-based Huawei does the job in Oslo. Finland (original home of the Sonera bit) will get the next 4G boost in 2010, for a pilot group of customers.
It’s no coincidence that mobile chip maker ST Ericsson demoed 3G/4G compatible kit this week, but it will probably take a couple of months for somebody to fully adopt it and to start selling multimode dongles.
Theoretical speeds of up to 100Mbps are possible with this implementation of 4G and running at least ten times faster than current 3G should be comfortable reality. Benchmark testing over the week from Engadget showed the Ericsson version in Stockholm to be running at about 40Mbps for downloading and 5Mbps when uploading.
Swedish network infrastructure supplier Ericsson has said it will cut an extra 1,500 jobs on top of 2009 targets, as it reported another massive quarterly drop in profits. The company’s planned 5000 head-count reduction for 2009 was exceeded, and is now expected to top 6500.