Sony Ericsson warned the world just over a fortnight ago that things wouldn't be too rosy when it came time to announce Q2 results, and rosy things are not. Even though the handset maker was hoping and praying to break even at the end of the quarter, net profits ended up falling through the floor to the tune of 97%. As predicted, weak sales of mid-to-high-end mobiles were blamed for the bulk of the bad news, and it did affirm that conditions would remain rough for the rest of the year. Granted, the looming launch of the Xperia X1 should help matters a bit, but without a new stable of low-end cellies to send to emerging markets, it'll be a long road back to the top. Unfortunately, SE's sagging position in the market has left it slashing 2,000 jobs across the globe, though it didn't say exactly where the cuts would be made. It's okay SE, there's only one place to go when you're laying on the bottom... or something like that.

[Image courtesy of Flickr]

Read - Sony Ericsson's Q2 earnings
Read - Sony Ericsson plans job cuts

Although Sony Ericsson just churned out a rather impressive array of new handsets this month, it seems the outfit is still having trouble securing record-setting profits. Truthfully, it's struggling to break even, as evidenced by the second profit warning of 2008 that was issued last week. SE is pinpointing "disappointing European sales of its mid- and high-end mobile phones" as the reason it will likely not see a profit in Q2, and some analysts are suggesting that shipment delays and a dearth of low-end handsets also carry a share of the blame. 'Course, the hotly-anticipated Xperia X1 could certainly make for a lovely Q3, but only time will tell if enough folks shell out for it to make a difference.

It looks like it's a surprisingly good time to be a behemoth US carrier, with both AT&T and Verizon reporting some pretty aggressive profits in the first quarter of 2008 in the face of a flagging economy. Many of Verizon's results closely mirror AT&T's actually, with data revenue absolutely destroying the numbers from a year ago -- up 48.9 percent year over year, in Big Red's case. As we can see from Verizon's own documentation here, they're tooting their horn against their arch-nemesis with more net adds, a slightly better ARPU, lower churn, and lower cost per customer, with service revenue and total subs (of course) being AT&T's big wins. Whether the momentum can be kept up through a challenging '08 remains to be seen, but it's a solid start for the nation's number two. Hit the gallery below for a big shot of Verizon's message to employees regarding the results.

[Thanks, anonymous tipster]

The royalty, lawsuit, and chipset machine better known as Qualcomm has gone public with its digits for the second quarter of fiscal 2008, and to sum things up, it's all looking pretty rosy. At $2.61 billion, revenue was up a solid 17 percent year over year -- up 7 from the previous quarter -- and income totaled $766 million, up 6 percent year over year. That works out to 47 cents worth of diluted earnings per share, a 9 percent improvement over the same period a year ago. The MediaFLO division still isn't in the black, though, with its Qualcomm Strategic Initiatives parent reporting a loss of 2 cents per share and $76 million worth of operating expenses in the quarter, "primarily related" to the mobile TV unit. Guess there's probably a little pressure for the AT&T launch to go smoothly, swiftly, and profitably, eh? [Warning: PDF link]

[Via mocoNews]

Economic downturn and Sprint woes be damned, because AT&T's not hearin' a bit of it. The company's wireless unit -- which also happens to be the largest carrier in the country -- announced that it put up some serious numbers in the first quarter of 2008, growing revenue 18.3 percent year over year for a grand total of $11.8 billion. It tacked on 1.3 million new subscribers in the quarter, an 8.7 percent improvement in net gain over the same period in 2007, and grew ARPU by 2 percent in that time. Perhaps most eye-widening, though, is the fact that wireless data revenue grew a boggling 57.3 percent over the last year, thanks in part to the 620 million and 44 billion multimedia and text messages sent in the three-month span, respectively. Needless to say, the wireless division's looking just a little more... shall we say, "dynamic" than the wireline group at the moment, as recent job moves would indicate.

[Via mocoNews]

Can't win 'em all, we suppose. After a positively stellar fourth quarter of 2007 that saw Nokia grab a mind-boggling 40 percent of the world's mobile market share, the number one manufacturer slipped a smidge in the first quarter of this year, dropping down to 39 percent globally. That news is just one tidbit of a very interesting report that sees Nokia's year-over-year performance improve by a wide margin, while at the same time warning that the value of its mobile business is expected to decline versus 2007 thanks largely to the weak US dollar and a global economy that's been putting on the brakes as of late. Also of note is CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo's comment that the company will have no "major new products" shipping in the second quarter, likely putting to rest any hopes that we'd see the N78 out before July -- unless the guy doesn't consider the N78 a major new product, which we think would be a pretty misguided belief. Nokia also notes here that it still expects to grow its market share overall in 2008 -- despite the 1 percent decline this quarter -- so any other players out there gunning at nabbing a piece of that profitable pie are going to have to keep the pressure on, it seems.

Global economic meltdown be damned! RIM's humming right along, apparently, reporting a killer fourth quarter with $412.5 million in profit, beating its own estimates and netting more than double the amount from the same period a year prior. Jim Balsillie himself chimed in on the results, saying that the company "did not see any evidence of slowdown in our enterprise business" -- amazing, considering that a stagnating job market would seem to lead to smaller BlackBerry budgets. Perhaps even more impressive, though, is that RIM is predicting first quarter earnings that'll significantly outpace analyst estimates in the face of stiff competition that's getting ever stiffer in RIM's own enterprise turf and an economy that's showing no sign of turning around any time soon. Don't suppose they could divert some of those fat profits to shoring up shaky servers, hmm?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Nokia isn't the only manufacturer going the opposite direction of Motorola at the moment. LG managed to ship 23.7 million phones in the fourth quarter of 2007, a 40 percent improvement over the same period in 2006; following a trends across the industry, though, its revenue was up considerably less -- a mere 12 percent -- thanks to freefalling handset prices worldwide. The company says that a healthy portion of its success can be attributed to the good fortunes it has seen with Verizon's Venus and Voyager and with the Viewty throughout Europe. Things are looking good for 2008, too -- LG predicts that it'll ship a whopping 100 million handsets throughout the year, which if true would represent a 25 percent increase over 2007's numbers. As it stands, LG slides in with 7.1 percent of the global phone market share, slotting it fifth among the top five manufacturers (nothing new there) and about 2 percent behind number four, Sony Ericsson. Best of luck in the new year, dudes.

Just as forecasted, Research in Motion has delivered quite the Wall Street-pleasing results in the fiscal third-quarter. The BlackBerry maker's recently released numbers showed a staggering $370.5 million profit compared to "just" $175.2 million in the same quarter last year. Furthermore, the firm's Q3 revenue rose to $1.67 billion from $835.1 million last year. According to co-CEO Jim Balsillie, it's pretty "clear [that] BlackBerry smartphones have crossed over from being viewed as a primarily enterprise product to being marketed as a strong mainstream offering," and considering the results, it's hard to argue that point. Oh, and just in case you haven't seen enough digits in one post, it should be noted that RIM shipped out more than 3.9 million handsets and added around 1.65 million BlackBerry subscribers in Q3, also. Not too shabby, eh?

It ain't a magic bullet, but it looks like the RAZR 2 could end up being a big part of Motorola's turnaround after all -- a turnaround ironically necessary thanks to the company's over-reliance on the first gen RAZR. Though Motorola still ended up posting third quarter losses totaling $138 million in its mobile device division (compared to earnings of $843 million just one year prior), fourth quarter projections beat analysts' estimates, sending stock prices skyward in the process. A couple interesting bits from the report: the company's enterprise mobility group (think Q and the like) saw sales rise some 47 percent from a year ago, and remember that RAZR 2 we mentioned? Yeah, turns out Moto's nearing the magic one million mark already, with over 900,000 units having been sold. 'Course, it certainly doesn't hurt that all four national US carriers and several regionals have picked it up.

Although those Chad-based commercials may be unnerving, something is sure working for Alltel. Reportedly, the carrier added 205,000 subscriptions in the most recent quarter, which is "double the year-ago increase," and it also noted that the rate at which it lost customers fell to just 1.9-percent. Furthermore, the outfit raked in some $283 million in profits -- a fine sum compared to the $187 million garnered this time last year. As for the buyout, it suggested that it was expecting a "favorable FCC vote to come soon," meaning that the "takeover by TPG Capital and GS Capital Partners should be completed by the end of the year."

Research In Motion has little to kvetch about these days, especially when you consider that it essentially doubled its sales and profits from the same quarter a year ago. The BlackBerry maker recently announced that it had not only passed the ten-million subscriber mark, but "that its profit and revenue more than doubled in the period." Furthermore, the firm noted that "results should be better than expected for the rest of the year," and it suggested that the "outperformance was driven by the strong product cycle, as well as the diversification of its user base across multiple geographies and market segments."

Sprint's recent second quarter financial results showed an interesting mix of numbers: income dropped by 90 percent, wireless data revenue jumped by 40 percent and the carrier broke the 54 million-customer mark. Dropping from a $291 million profit in the year-ago quarter to a $19 million profit is, well, pretty huge. But, at least Sprint saw its average revenue per sub sit above $60 for its latest quarter, with $9.75 attributable to data revenue. Everyone break out some EV-DO data sessions in salute of this if you please. On a lighter note, Sprint CEO Gary Foresee said the iPhone "blip" has not significantly affected number ports to AT&T, although the level is up "slightly" from before the iPhone launch.

[via mocoNews]

We'll admit, anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention should have seen this coming a mile away, but the latest financial news from Palm is far from peachy. The firm announced a whopping 43-percent dropoff in profits compared to this quarter just one year ago, and the stock subsequently slid four-percent as a result. Of course, the perpetual delays of its modern-day operating system cannot be helping the cause, and considering the innovation that has surfaced in the smartphone arena over the past 12 months, it was only a matter of time before this happened. Interestingly enough, rival RIM was able to find a way to keep on keepin' on all the while, as it simultaneously posted a staggering 76.5-percent increase in revenue from the same quarter a year ago -- talk about salting the wound.

Unlike video game consoles, phones are typically profitable to manufacture from day one and it turns out that the iPhone is no exception -- far from it, in fact. Teardown specialists at Portelligent claim that the 4GB iPhone runs Apple just $200 worth of components, while the 8GB adds an extra $20, not far off at all from iSuppli's slightly higher estimates from January. Granted those tallies don't include the actual cost of assembling the device -- but even so, those numbers are very far cries from the $500 and $600 asking prices at the register, leaving a healthy $299 and $379 respectively (of which an overwhelming majority are $379) for profit and miscellaneous costs. Interestingly, Portelligent's unceremonious destruction of an iPhone in the name of research revealed no further proof that Hon Hai / Foxconn is the ODM responsible for assembling the darned thing.