Tag: mobile phone

Samsung Group freezes salaries

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

Samsung rules the roostSouth Korea’s lead chaebol, Samsung Group, announced on Thursday that it has decided to freeze salaries for its executives next year in an attempt to reduce costs, the first time since the 2009 global financial crisis. The income of approximately 2,000 executives at the business group, which includes Samsung Electronics Co. will remain fixed throughout 2015. Incentive pay will continue and will depend on each division’s profit performance.

The main culprit for the corporate belt tightening is Samsung Electronics unit, which has seen consecutive quarterly earning falls as the company continues to lose market share to Apple and aggressive low cost Chinese rivals. Samsung Electronics has seen its market share drop 7.7% to 24.4% of the global market according to Gartner Inc. Meanwhile major Chinese brands including Huawei, Xiami and Lenovo expanded their global market share to 15.5% in the third quarter – up 4.1% year-on-year.

Samsung Electronics took other cost-saving reduction earlier in the year, which include executive travel in economy class on flights under 10 hour durations and encouraging employees to take vacations instead of receiving pay for unused time off.

Techeye Take

Samsung has been warning for some time now that the profitability of its mobile phone division would be under duress – in fact they earlier declared that the chaebol’s main profit centre would be the semiconductor division which has been reporting good results. The fact that all the group’s executives will share in the discomfort will not be lost on those deemed responsible for their lack of expected Korean management skills…,

Amazon Fire Phone fails to rage

Posted on August 28, 2014 by - News

quo_vadis_poster-nero-plays-while-rome-burns-w450Amazon’s Fire Phone was launched in July to a great fanfare over its 3D-effect maps and multiple front-facing cameras.

But apparently it has been greeted with a collective yawn by actual users and there are signs that Amazon priced itself out of the market.

The Fire Phone cost $200 for a 32GB version on an AT&T contract – the same price range as the iPhone 5S or Samsung GS5.

According to a release from Chitika, looking at activity on its ad network in the 20 days after the Fire Phone’s release, the Fire Phone accounted for 0.015 per cent of activity.

This sounds a low number, but it is possible to work out how many phones that might represent. Using data from ComScore for the three months to the end of June 2014 there were 173m smartphones in use in the US.

That figure is rising by between a million or two a month so two months later, by mid-August, when the Chitika data was collected, there would be about 177 million smartphones in use in the US. .015% of 177 million means 26,550 Fire phones in use.

Of course, you have to assume that Amazon’s Fire Phone will show up on Chitika’s network as often as any other phone, but even allowing for errors, does seem that the Fire sold only 35,000 Fire Phones during those 20 days.

Amazon said that it was in the phone game for the long play and it intends to be patient. That might work in the long term, but we would have thought Amazon would go for a cheaper more popular product, as it did successfully with its tablets.

US wants to make unlocking phones legal again

Posted on July 11, 2014 by - News

pressieThe US Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a plan which would give mobile-phone users the right to “unlock” their devices and use them on competitors’ networks.

The bill by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont, is similar to legislation passed by the House of Representatives in February and is expected to have bipartisan support when it reaches the Senate floor for a vote.

In 2012 ruling by the Library of Congress, who looks after US copyright law, made phone-unlocking illegal. Unlocking could sent you to jail where you cannot pass go or collect $200.

The move supported US wireless carriers who were “locking” smartphones to their networks to encourage consumers to renew mobile contracts.

However, there is some move amongst the wireless carriers to make it easier for consumers to unlock their phones after their contracts expire.

Leahy’s bill reinstates the exemption given to mobile phones in the copyright law before the 2012 ruling and calls on the officials there to reconsider the issue during its next round of reviews in 2015, potentially expanding the exemption to tablets and other devices.

In addition to allowing consumers to unlock devices themselves, Leahy’s bill would allow consumers to authorise someone else to do it for them.