News tagged ‘share’

According to findings released on Tuesday by Nielsen, Apple remained the largest smartphone manufacture in the Unites States in the third quarter. While smartphones sales continue to grow in the U.S., accounting for 56 percent of all cellphone sales in the prior quarter, Apple’s market share has reached 30%. Apple's third quarter performance was followed by HTC with a 20.3% share.

As for mobile platforms, Android and iOS dominate with a 71.1% share, holding 42.8% and 28.3% respectively. About a half of all mobile users in the United States owns a smartphone. During the prior quarter 56% of all handsets purchases were smartphones. The third place still belongs to RIM's BlackBerry platform with 17.8% that was followed by Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform, HP's Palm/webOS, Symbian and the fledgling Windows Phone.

App downloads in the third quarter saw that Google and Apple have the largest share. 83% of all downloads were made through Android and iOS devices. But Google has recently expressed dissatisfaction by the situation with app downloads, and hinted at upcoming changes that would bring its online store more in line with Apple's.

According to research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, demand for Apple’s iPhone 4S helped the company to push it market share in the UK to nearly 43% in October. Apple's U.K. market share increased 2.8 percent to 27.8 percent year-to-year and it is the first time since late 2010 when Apple’s sales beat Android-based handset sales in the region.

"Apple took a whopping 42.8 percent share of all smartphone sales, giving it a significant lead over Android - a feat many thought was impossible," said Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director at the firm.

About 75 percent of British customers who purchased an iPhone 4S in October already own a previous version of the device, with 14 percent upgrading from last year's iPhone 4. Sunnebo claims that the main driver for the sales of the iPhone 4S in the U.K. was the existing iPhone users. The second driver is rather long period between the launches of the iPhone 4 and 4S.

According to the Bloomber’s report, Sothby’s is going to auction off the original four-page founding contract among Steve Jobs, Ron Wayne and Steve Wozniak that established Apple Computer Company on April 1st, 1976. The document is expected to fetch from $100,000 to $150,000 on the auction that is planned for December 13th. Richard Austin, the director of books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s in New York, said:

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Apple has posted a new iPod touch ad entitled, 'Share The Fun'.

With iMessage, Game Center, FaceTime and more, you can share the fun on iPod Touch

Take a look:

After Steve Jobs’ death, speculations arose on what would be done with his huge estate, estimated in $7 billion. The majority of his wealth is represented by the 138 million shares of the Walt Disney Co. that were placed in trust. Jobs acquired shares in 2006 having sold Pixar to the company for $7.4 billion. Tax experts suggest that Job’s family should sell all Apple and Disney share to avoid higher taxes. According to Bloomberg, the family could save $867 million in capital gains taxes.

Noteworthy, placing shares in a trust is also a method to avoid higher taxed, though it’s not clear what type of trust was set up in this case. According to Bloomberg, Jobs moved his assets into trusts toward the end of his life.

Now the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell, will manage a $4.6 billion trust. Some experts expect her to use a portion of the trust for charity and philanthropic work, as she is an active participant in the non-profit sector.

Last week Gartner reported that Android doubled its market share year-over-year, while Apple experienced a decline at 15%, compared to the previous quarter. Despite that fact, a report from research company GfK (via Reuters) states that iPhone users are more likely to show loyalty to iOS by buying another iPhone when upgrading their smartphone.

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Earlier this week, Disney Chairman and Chief Executive Bob Iger received more than $84,000 in stock for joining Apple's board of directors. According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Iger received 75 shares of common stock and 142 restricted shares that will vest in February of 2012. It amounts $84,376 in cash.

This week Apple announced that Iger became member of Apple’s board of directors. He will serve on the company's audit committee. His compensation for joining Apple's board is comparable to what others who joined received in the past. For example, Andrea Jung, who joint Apple’s board in 2008, received 77 shares of common stocks.

Iger’s relationships with Apple have quite long history. In 2006 he was responsible for acquisition of Pixar. Moreover, he is a Disney CEO. He was one of the first people who expressed condolences to Jobs’ family after he passed away. "With his passing the world has lost a rare original, Disney has lost a member of our family, and I have lost a great friend," Iger said.

According to a new analysis, first time for 15 years Apple’s worldwide share of PC market passed 5 percent up from 4.7 percent in June and 4.4 percent a year ago. Analyst Charlie Wolf of Needham & Co. reported that in the third calendar quarter of 2011 Mac shipments outpaced the PC market for the 22nd straight quarter. Apple’s growth was 24.6 percent, while growth in total PC shipments was 5.3 percent. During this quarter Apple sold 4.89 million Macs, there are the record numbers of Mac sales.

"More impressively, the growth in Mac shipments in the past year represented 20% of the growth in worldwide PC shipments," he said. To further put things into perspective, Wolf noted that Apple's September quarter Mac shipments exceeded annual Mac shipments for all years prior to 2006.

Mac shipments significantly increased in both the home and business markets. In home market Mac shipments showed 25.6 percent growth, while the overall increase was only 4 percent. Shipments to the business market were an impressive nine times the market pace: 43.8 percent versus 4.8 percent. Wolf suggested that Mac success could be attributed to halo effect from the iPad and iPhone.

However, Apple didn’t show great performance in the education and government markets. In the third calendar quarter of 2011 Mac shipments to education customers for the quarter grew on 2.9 percent, compared to 16.9 percent for the PC market. Such situation might be caused by the iPad cannibalization of the education market.

Analyst Brian Marshall with International Strategy & Investment Group claims that apple may finally pay its shareholders dividends, despite the company’s long resistance. Most investors do not believe Apple will initiate a dividend policy in 2012, but if the company will, it may gain an additional $4 billion in investments.

At the moment the current Apple’s CEO Tim Cook is reorganizing the company, so he may probably make an effort to optimize capital structure and start paying dividends Apple’s shareholders. Brian Marshall believes that Apple could "easily" implement a dividend yield of 250 base points, amounting to about $2.40 per quarter.

Apple’s previous CEO, Steve Jobs, didn’t support the idea of dividend distribution and preferred to invest in strategic opportunities such as last year purchase of Siri (Apple paid about $200 million).

"We strongly believe one or more strategic opportunities will come along we're in a unique position to take advantage of," the late Apple CEO said in 2010. "We don't let the cash burn a hole in the pocket or make stupid acquisitions. We'd like to continue to keep our powder dry because we think there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future."

According to the results of worldwide mobile phone sales for the third quarter of 2011, released yesterday by the research firm Gartner, Apple's share of the total mobile phone market came in at 3.9% for the quarter, down from 4.6% in the previous quarter. However, Apple still takes fourth place behind Nokia, Samsung, and LG.

Apple shipped 17 million iPhones, an annual increase of 21 percent, but down nearly 3 million units from the second quarter of 2011 because of Apple's new device announcement in October. Gartner believes Apple will bounce back in the fourth quarter because of its strongest ever preorders for the iPhone 4S in the first weekend after its announcement. Markets such as Brazil, Mexico, Russia and China are becoming more important to Apple, representing 16 percent of overall sales and showing that the iPhone has a place in emerging markets, especially now that the 3GS and 4 have received price cuts.

iOS share slipped from an 18.2% in the second quarter to 15.0% in the third quarter. Android and Nokia with its soon-to-be-defunct Symbian platform are now leaders of the market. During the quarter, Android’s share increased by 52.5%, more than doubling year-over-year.

But Android dominates the worldwide smartphone market by units while Apple by profit. Some researches show that Apple now takes more than a half of the industry's profits.

According to a new research carried out by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, Apple’s October Mac sales in the United States were up 19% year-over-year. That means that the company could reach analysts’ expectations and sell 5.1-5.3 million units for the full quarter.

Analyst Gene Munster with Piper Jaffray shared the latest domestic sales data from the NPD Group on Monday, which showed Mac sales up 19 percent year over year in the month of October. As sales continue to pick up leading up to Christmas, he sees Apple selling between 5.1 million and 5.3 million Macs during the December quarter.

Those numbers would represent year over year growth of between 23 percent and 28 percent. Consensus on Wall Street has called for Apple to report sales of about 5.2 million Macs during the quarter.

Last quarter Apple managed to sell 4.89 million Macs. These very numbers spurred analysts to push their Mac estimates to over 5 million.

Unfortunately, the iPod shipments in the United States are continuing to decrease. In October the iPod sales were down about 18% year-over-year. That might be connected with the fact that more and more consumers prefer to use smartphones for portable music needs rather than music players. Nevertheless such decline is smaller when it was expected. Analysts predicted a 20% drop for this quarter. That is why Munster suggests that Apple may sell approximately 16 million music players in for the full quarter.

According to The Chosunilbo report (via The Next Web), Samsung has at the last minute decided not to seek an injunction against iPhone 4S sales in South Korea, its home country. It appears that Samsung’s decision was driven by public relations considerations and the company preferred not to irk customers in South Korea by attempting to ban iPhone sales there. The company debated until the last minute whether to file the action similar to applications in Italy, Australia, France and Japan. A senior Samsung executive said:

“We concluded that we should engage in legal battles with Apple only in the global market, but not in order to gain more market share in Korea”.

Nuance has dropped a new Dragon dictation app called Dragon Express in Mac App Store. This is a cheaper (introductory price $49), scaled-back version of Nuance’s Dragon Dictate program. The new version can be accessed from the Lion’s menubar and will not require a network connection. You can open the Dragon Express window with a mouse click or keyboard shortcut and instantly begin dictate into the window via USB headset microphone or internal Mac microphone. The transcribed text will immediately appear in the dictate window and from there you can copy, email the text, start a web search with it or share it with your social networking contacts.

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Flurry, mobile analytics firm, reports that portable gaming has seen a continuous shift from dedicated gaming devices to smartphones and other multifunctional devices.

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There has been concerns over the design of iPhone 4S that shares the same stainless steel and glass enclosure with iPhone 4. Because of that, some questioned if iPhone 4 has the same flawed antenna as iPhone 4.

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