News from category ‘Financial’

The Next Web reports that Apple has started to issue refunds to App Store customers for Final Cut Pro X, Motion, or Compressor after a wave of criticism from professionals due to absent of many “pro” functionalities of the previous version.  One of the customers posted the e-mail demonstrating how Apple is dealing with these problems:

Moving forward, I understand that you are not satisfied with the app “Final Cut Pro”. I can certainly appreciate you would like a refund, and I would be more than happy to help you out with this today. In five to seven business days, a credit of £179.99 should be posted to the credit card that appears on the receipt for that purchase.

Please note that this is a one time exception because the iTunes Terms and Conditions state that all sales are final.

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Manolution has published an interesting detailed timeline that show events and stock prices throughout the historic battle between Microsoft and Apple.

Despite maintaining dominance of the OS market for over three decades, Microsoft’s stocks continue to trade at or below their first ever public value of $27.50 (at closing on 3/13/1986).

Thanks to Apple’s extremely successful ventures into various hand-held gadget markets (namely the iPod, iPhone and iPad) Apple’s stock continues to rise, trading at over $300 more than that of Microsoft’s as of 6/6/2011.

Take a look at the infographic (~3Mb):

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This week Reuters reported that the executives of "highest level" for Samsung and Apple had a recent meeting and discussed their legal dispute.

The information was revealed by Apple attorney Harold MacElhinny, who responded on Friday to questioning from Lucy Koh, who is a U.S. Disctrict Judge.

Koh hoped the companies may resolve the case without attracting the court and thus said:

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A popular fan site IfoAppleStore, which tracks Apple's successes in retail, reported that Apple started a new and expensive rejuvenation project at its Fifth Avenue store. This is the same store in New York that attracts so many people with its iconic glass cube entrance.

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Here is good news for RIM so regularly criticized by Apple: advertisers of mobile devices didn’t forget about the platform and are currently taking a second look on it, which results in rising of dumb phone advertising, stated an advertising network Millennial Media this Wednesday.

This surprising comeback has expressed in 6 percent grew of mobile ads on RIM devices in May, while "feature phones" make up 17 percent of Feature Phone, Smartphone and Connected Devices mix in May, as estimated by Millennial Media. The key to these surprising figures may be in the BlackBerry Curve and BlackBerry Bold 2 taking a place among top five mobile phones using served ads.

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An interesting report from Asymco estimates that it costs Apple $1.3 billion per year to run the iTunes store.

Asymco analyzed recently announced numbers like the total number of songs, movies, TV shows, apps, download rate, iTunes accounts and how much Apple has paid out to developers. They put these numbers in a complex formula and estimated that Apple's monthly content margin cost for iTunes at $113 million, which is more than $1.3 billion per year.

That's a lot. It looks like all the iTunes profits go right back into its maintenance and expansion.

Nokia announced that it had entered into agreement with Apple, and now the prolonged legal argument between two corporations is coming to an end with two parties withdrawing their complaints to the International Trade Commission.

A press release that announced the signed patent license agreement was issued by Nokia early Tuesday. Agreement stipulates that Apple have to make a one-time payment to Nokia as well as ongoing royalties. But exact details of the agreement are kept in secret. The statement also reads that Nokia has put about 43 billion EUR into research and development in the course of last 20 years, creating a patent portfolio that consists of  10,000 patent families.

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Japanese market analysis firm Nomura predicts Samsung will soon become the largest smartphone maker in the world instead of Nokia.

Yesterday Reuters reported on that prediction and added that Apple may also move past Nokia and leave the latter in third place.

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Today we mentioned that Apple may release revamped MacBook Air soon. A Wall Street analyst Chris Whitmore from Deutsche Bank believes the release of new netbooks along with the launch of Lion may boost sales of MacBooks Air to 1.5 million orders per quarter.

In case that will come true he concludes that Apple's thin-and-light notebook may eventually represent nearly 50% of the company's total notebook business.

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As you remember, last month an explosion at Foxconn plant in Chengdu, China, took life of three people and at least fifteen were injured. But the consequences of the tragedy affected not only people, but also Foxconn's profits. Here is what DigiTimes reported today:

Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry) had non-consolidated revenues of NT$200.561 billion (US$6.95 billion) for May dropping 2.14 percent on month due to the impact of an explosion at its plant in Chengdu City, western China, according to the company.

The iPad plant went on fire on May 20 after the ignition of flammable aluminum dust. The production on the facility was resumed ten days ago. Previously we also reported SACOM warned Foxconn that its plant is Chengdu is dangerously explosive because of low damage control mode.

DigiTimes sources revealed this week that HTC may challenge Apple's position of the top U.S. smartphone maker.

Here's the deal: HTC has smartphones available on all four U.S. carriers, while Apple partners only with AT&T and Verizon. The HTC Thunderbolt is reported as the second most popular smartphone on Verizon's network, while Apple's iPhone is the first one. The best-selling Android smartphone on AT&T is also of HTC (The Inspire 4G).

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In just 14 months, Apple has sold over 25 million iPads. So now the total number of devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) running iOS had reached 200 million since the original iPhone launched in 2007. Apple’s iOS has got the first place among mobile software with 44% of the total market (Android took 28% of the market and RIM - 19%).

Our customers couldn’t wait to get their hands on the iPad 2. In the first 14 months, we’ve sold 25 million iPads

Over 15 billion songs were sold through the iTunes store. The iBookstore has over 130, 000 downloads. Apple now has 225 million accounts aggregated from the iTunes, iBooks and App Stores. Over 14 billion downloads were made from the App Store, so developers received over $ 2,5 billion dollars since 2008 when the App Store was launched.

Apple could not achieve such success without its 324 retail stores, employing 30, 000 employees. Though it is not easy to become Apple’s employee, but it is worth it. Apple pays its employees much more than its competitors. For example, Geniuses on average make $18 dollars an hour, with the helpful blue shirts earning around $16 dollars an hour as they guide customers to new products, show them how to use services, and make sales. So it is clearly that Apple’s employees are highly motivated and expected to work hard and sell the Apple experience. Not surprisingly that in the first two fiscal quarters for 2011, Apple’s retail division has already earned $7.04 billion in revenue of Apple’s $51.41 billion. Apple’s retail stores offer a level of convenience and friendliness that big retail chains just can’t match.

The New York Post reports that Apple will pay between $100 and $150 million in advance payments to the four major record labels, Sony Music, EMI, Warner Music and Universal, for iCloud license agreements with them. Each of them was offered between $25 million and $50 million. Of course, the total amount will depend on number of songs consumers will store in iCloud.

The New York Post also mentioned that Apple would receive 30 % of fees, the music publishers - 12% and the rest would go towards record labels and artists. Apple is known to have finalized all deals concerning iCloud. The last one was recently sealed with Universal Music. The official iCloud announcement will be made on Monday, June 6, at the WWDC keynote.

A new report issued by Research2Guidance shows that Apple dominates among other mobile application stores in terms of application downloads. In first quarter of 2011 59% of all applications were downloaded from the Apple’s App Store. Though the numbers are quiet large, they demonstrate a fall in 22% comparing with 81% then the App Store first opened. During the report 58 application stores were surveyed. Noteworthy, there were only 18 application stores when the iPhone App Store launched in July of 2008. The Android Market is the strongest competitor to the App Store that led to 24% fall of the App Store’s share of application downloads.  Though, resent numbers show 2% increase of App Store’s share. Moreover, users, who already spent significant amounts of money on apps, unlikely want to switch to other mobile platform.