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Capital Talk 29th October 2009
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Meray Mutabiq 31st October 2009
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By Shahid Hussain on Oct 30, 2009 in Information Technology | comments(0)
Apple’s local service provider, China Unicom Ltd., hopes the iPhone will give it an edge against giant rival China Mobile Ltd., the world’s biggest phone company by subscribers.
Unicom was to start selling iPhones equipped for third-generation service Friday night at 2,000 stores in areas as farflung as Tibet. Chinese news reports say Unicom hopes to sell 5 million in three years, but the company declined to confirm that.
Unicom’s first iPhones lack WiFi, a possible handicap with sophisticated, demanding Chinese buyers. The technology, a key part of the iPhone’s appeal, allows the phones in other markets to use wireless networks in cafes and offices to download e-mail and the latest applications for free.
“There’s going to be a perception that the phone they have is dumbed down from the one that somebody has in California,” said Duncan Clark, chairman of BDA China Ltd., a Beijing-based technology research firm. “We’ve seen before that Chinese consumers don’t like to be treated like second-class citizens.”
Apple Inc. and Unicom also could face competition from an unusual source: unlocked iPhones brought in from abroad that have WiFi.
There are already an estimated 1.5 million to 2 million such phones in China using China Mobile 3G service that allows Internet access and other features.
Unicom’s prices range from 4,999 yuan ($730) to 6,999 yuan ($1,025) for the high-end, 32-gigabyte iPhone 3GS. That is 20 percent above the 5,700 yuan ($835) charged by merchants at Chinese street markets for a 3GS with WiFi.
The iPhone’s awkward, delayed entry into China reflects the regulatory and technical hurdles of a fast-changing market where other global technology companies have struggled to establish themselves.
Unicom’s iPhones lack WiFi because it was temporarily banned by Beijing, which was promoting a rival Chinese system, according to BDA. The ban was relaxed in May after manufacturing had begun.
A Unicom spokesman, Yi Difei, said the company hopes to have WiFi in the next batch of phones.
“We are talking with Apple and expect the problem to be solved by the end of this year,” Yi said.
The iPhone debuted in the United States in June 2007 but its formal arrival in China was delayed as Apple carried on talks with service providers that Chinese media said snagged on disagreements about how to divide revenues.
China has more than 650 million mobile phone accounts, despite an average annual income of $3,000 per person. Consumers trade in phones as often as several times a year to get the latest models and features.
China Unicom has 143 million mobile accounts, which would be an impressive figure in any other market but lags far behind China’s Mobile’s 508 million accounts.
Global technology companies that dominate other markets have struggled to get a foothold in China. Search engine Google Inc. has less than 30 percent of the market, versus more than 60 percent for local rival Baidu Inc. Yahoo Inc. turned over its China operation to a local partner after failing to expand its market share.
China’s state-owned phone companies were restructured by the communist government into three groups last year in hopes of reviving competition after the explosive popularity of mobile service turned China Mobile into a behemoth.
Unicom, China Mobile and the third company, China Telecom Ltd., all emerged with mobile and fixed-line services.
China Mobile has announced its own smart phone, dubbed the OPhone, and says seven models will be available by next year.
Chinese news reports in August said Unicom’s deal with Apple called for buying 5 million handsets for 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion). Chairman Chang Xiaobin denied that but refused to give financial details.
The lack of WiFi means Unicom iPhone customers will have to pay to connect to the phone network for every function. BDA’s Clark said that could alienate users if it leads to high monthly bills.
“This could be a real fiasco,” he said.
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Associated Press researcher Bonnie Cao contributed to this report.
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On the Net:
Apple Inc.: http://www.apple.com
China Unicom Ltd.: http://www.chinaunicom.com.cn
(jrm)
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By Shahid Hussain on Oct 30, 2009 in Information Technology | comments(0)
Nintendo’s first-half profit plunged as sales of its blockbuster Wii home console lost momentum in a saturated market. The maker of Super Mario and Pokemon games now expects annual earnings to fall for the first time in six years.
Kyoto-based Nintendo Co. reported a 69.49 billion yen ($772 million) profit for the April-September period, down 52 percent from a year earlier, and trailed its own May forecast for a 100 billion yen profit. Fiscal first-half sales dropped 34.5 percent to 548.01 billion yen.
Tokyo-based Hitachi, which makes everything from nuclear reactors to home appliances, and NEC Corp., a provider of IT services and network systems, also fared poorly. But Sharp Corp. reaped rewards from cost cuts and stronger demand for flat panel TVs, which have been falling in price.
The mixed results at Japan’s major technology companies underline not only the hardships of the global economic slump but also differing success in achieving a recovery. Overall, the economic dive appears to have bottomed out. But some companies are needing more time than others for a turnaround, the earnings show.
Hit by weak demand abroad and in Japan, Hitachi’s July-September losses swelled to 50.56 billion yen ($562 million) from a 17.37 billion yen loss a year earlier. It said business conditions remained “severe with production and consumption levels extremely low.”
NEC Corp. booked a loss of 9.75 billion yen ($110 million) for the quarter, compared with 1.28 billion yen profit the year before.
In contrast, Sharp Corp. credited booming TV sales and cost cuts for profit more than doubling to 7.4 billion yen ($82 million) in the fiscal second quarter from 3.1 billion yen during the same period last year.
The Osaka-based maker of the Aquos TV had sunk into the red for the previous three quarters because of the global economic slowdown. But people were now snatching up Sharp liquid crystal display TVs around the world, it said.
Profit outlooks with the exception of Nintendo were unchanged or a little less pessimistic.
Sharp stuck to its forecast for the full fiscal year through March 2010 at 3 billion yen ($33.3 million) profit.
NEC also kept unchanged its annual forecast for a 10 billion yen ($111 million) profit.
Hitachi said it now expects a narrower loss of 230 billion yen ($2.5 billion). It had initially expected a 270 billion yen loss, which would still have been better than its 787 billion yen loss for the fiscal year ended March.
But Nintendo, which had been booming for the last several years, lowered its projections, citing the erosion to revenue from a recent Wii price cut as well as the strong yen, which reduces the value of overseas earnings of Japanese exporters.
Nintendo said it will earn a 230 billion yen ($2.5 billion) profit — the first time in six years it’s predicting earnings to fall.
Nintendo reaped a record 279.1 billion yen profit for the fiscal year ended March, and had initially hoped to improve to a 300 billion yen ($3.3 billion) profit this year.
Hiroshi Kamide, a director at KBC Securities Japan, said the numbers weren’t good but within expectations. He said Nintendo would have to look to next year and a new machine, perhaps a handheld, to spur the next stage of growth.
“It’s just not realistic for them to repeat what they did last year,” he said.
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By Shahid Hussain on Oct 30, 2009 in Information Technology | comments(0)
SEOUL, South Korea –
The North Korean government was the source of high-profile cyberattacks in July that caused Web outages in South Korea and the United States, news reports said Friday.
The IP address — the Web equivalent of a street address or phone number — that triggered the Web attacks was traced back to North Korea’s Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, the chief of South Korean’s main spy agency reportedly told lawmakers.
The ministry leased the IP address from China, Won Sei-hoon of the National Intelligence Service told lawmakers Thursday, according to JoongAng Ilbo newspaper. South Korea’s Yonhap news agency carried a similar report.
The spy agency declined to confirm the reports. Two lawmakers on parliament’s intelligence committee contacted Friday also refused to confirm the reports. The Unification Ministry, which monitors North Korea, said it cannot comment on intelligence matters.
The July attacks, in which floods of computers tried to connect to a single Web site at the same time to overwhelm the server, caused outages on prominent government-run sites in the U.S. and South Korea. Affected sites include those of the White House and the South’s presidential Blue House.
North Korea immediately was suspected of involvement in the attacks but there has been little concrete evidence.
South Korean media reported at the time that North Korea runs an Internet warfare unit that tries to hack into U.S. and South Korean military networks to gather confidential information and disrupt service, and that the regime has between 500 and 1,000 hacking specialists.
Computer experts say the Web attacks like those waged in July are not difficult to launch.
“Many different parties could pull this off. This was not a particularly complex … attack to launch,” Rod Beckstrom, former head of the National Cybersecurity Center in the U.S., said Friday during a visit to Seoul.
“It’s definitely credible that anyone who had $50 million or a quarter-million dollars or a fairly limited amount of funding could hire hackers to go and perpetrate such an attack,” Beckstrom said.
Beckstrom was in the South Korean capital for a meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization overseeing Internet addresses that he heads.
North Korea could have launched the attacks in an attempt to “collect quality information” from the South or “to put psychological pressure on the South,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Dongguk University.
Ties between the two Koreas frayed after South Korea’s President Lee Myung-bak took office last year pledging to get tough with nuclear-armed Pyongyang. However, inter-Korean ties have improved in recent months.
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