A new report from Boston’s Strategy Analytics finds that mobile phone sales reached record levels in the third quarter of 2006, totaling some 256 million units, an increase of 22 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago. And mobile users’ love affair with Motorola’s RAZR seems to be losing its spark, as demand for Walkman and Cyber-shot phones pushed the company’s growth rate to 43 percent, letting Sony-Ericsson take over the world’s fastest-growing major mobile phone maker.
Tag Archive: Strategy
Netflix To Deliver Movies Over Internet
“Our strategy is to get huge in DVDs and then expand into downloads,” Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings told Reuters on Friday. “When we get to 5 million or 10 million subscribers, eventually what we spend on postage becomes a prize for the movie studios.”
Money saved by sending movies directly to consumers’ homes via the Web could be plowed back into buying more DVD titles to meet customer orders.
Read the full story at Reuters.
Motorola joins flat-screen TV business
A Motorola spokeswoman said its partner in the deal, Hong Kong-listed Proview International Holdings Ltd. , would make the products, which would be sold in China before being launched globally under the Motorola brand.
“Our consumer research tells us that we have a brand that is very valuable, and that consumers would be keen to buy other products beyond the core products,” Shelagh Lester-Smith told Reuters on Tuesday.
“It’s a natural extension for us to want to offer an augmented consumer experience in the home.”
Panasonic not adopting Sony strategy
The Osaka-based company behind Panasonic-brand products is taking a clearly different approach from longtime rival Sony Corp., which unveiled a new PlayStation 2 last week that combines features such as a DVD recorder and TV tuner with the game console.
“We think the demands are subtly different so in our strategy we will develop them separately,” said Kazuo Toda, Matsushita senior managing director.
Toda said the company’s analysis shows games and entertainment don’t really mix and products that tried to do that didn’t sell too well. Matsushita will continue to work with Nintendo Co. on game machines and there is no change in that strategy, he told reporters at a Panasonic showroom in Tokyo.
Analysts differ over Nintendo’s future
The research released by Strategy Analytics concludes that Nintendo must abandon its current console hardware strategy, and instead “do a Sega” by focusing on third party development instead. The group predicts that the GameCube will face a serious decline in 2003, with sales falling by 4 per cent while sales of the rival Xbox rise by 12 per cent.
DFC Intelligence, on the other hand, points out that Nintendo is the second largest company in the games industry, with $4.6 billion in revenue last year (behind Sony, with $8.2 billion; we assume that the exclusion of Microsoft here means that only games-related revenues are being counted) and predicts that the company will continue to pursue a console hardware strategy, describing it as “one of the true industry innovators”.
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