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2014 will be the last year of making sufficient changes for Microsoft’s smartphone and tablet strategies, and those changes should be radical if the company wants to succeed with its devices and services strategy

January 17, 2014 6:35 pm / Leave a comment

For the company’s most recent “ONE Microsoft” strategy see:
– Microsoft reorg for delivering/supporting high-value experiences/activities [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 11, 2013]
– How the device play will unfold in the new Microsoft organization? [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 14, 2013]
Update: There are extremely worrying signs on the horizon as per Jan 27, 2014:
– MediaTek MT6592-based True Octa-core superphones are on the market to beat Qualcomm Snapdragon 800-based ones UPDATE: from $147+ in Q1 and $132+ in Q2
– End of the Nokia “magic” hurting European and Asian consumers while mobile carriers are uncertain about the future under the Microsoft brand
End of Update
As 2014 will be the last year of “free ride” in the smartphone and tablet spaces for ARM-based competitors of Intel – at least what Intel is insisting again [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Jan 17, 2014] it is time to summarize the ARM-based opportunities for 2014 (note that Intel’s goal in the tablet space is only 40 million units, both Android and Windows):

imageCompare everything to 2014 global notebook demand forecast [DIGITIMES Research, Dec 5, 2013] which estimates that global notebook shipments in 2014 will reach around 160 million units, down from a peak of over 200 million in 2011, but the drop in 2014 will be lower than the on-year drop in 2013, with new market developments, new product opportunities, and changes in the major players’ strategies all playing critical roles in the IT industry’s future trends.

Digitimes Research: Global smartphone shipments to top 1.24 billion units in 2014 [Jan 14, 2014]
Global smartphone shipments are expected to top 1.24 billion units in 2014, with Samsung Electronics, Apple, LG Electronics, Sony Mobile Communications, Lenovo, Huawei [according to the company: 52 million units in 2013 vs 60 million target] , Microsoft, ZTE, Coolpad and TCL serving as top-10 vendors, according to Digitimes Research.
Apple may see its shipments double in 2014 largely due to increased shipments to China and Japan as it will benefit from its cooperation with the largest telecom operators in the two countries, said Digitimes Research.
The growth rate for Samsung will be limited in 2014 as its sales in the US, China and Japan will be depressed by growing popularity of iPhones.
China-based Lenovo, Huawei and Coolpad are expected to step up their efforts to boost sales in overseas markets after being enlisted among the top-10 vendors due to higher shipment volumes in the home market in China.
However, TCL and ZTE will continue to ship smartphones to overseas markets mainly, but will also strengthen sales in China, with domestic sales to account for less than 50% of their total shipments in 2014, commented Digitimes Research.
This article is an excerpt from a Digitimes Research Special Report (2014 global smartphone market forecast).
Digitimes Research: China smartphone-use application processor shipments edge up 2.4% in 4Q13 [Jan 15, 2014]
Shipments of application processors for smartphone applications to China grew 2.4% sequentially and 20.8% on year in the fourth quarter of 2013, according to data compiled by Digitimes Research.
MediaTek saw its AP shipments decline 3.9% sequentially in the fourth quarter due to inventory checks at clients and a high growth recorded in the previous quarter.
However, it was a 20% sequential shipment decline suffered by Qualcomm the fourth quarter that weakened the growth momentum of the application processor sector, said Digitimes Research.
Meanwhile, MediaTek has been shifting its focus to the high-margin segment, instead of seeking high shipment growth. China-based Spreadtrum Communications was hit with high inventory of TD-SCDMA chips and slow sales of its dual- and quad-core solutions, Digitimes Research indicated.
Qualcomm also saw its performance weaken in the fourth quarter as its QRD (Qualcomm reference design) chips were less competitive than those offered by rivals in terms of product features.
This article is an excerpt from a Chinese-language Digitimes Research report. Click here if you are interested in receiving more information about the content and price of a translated version of the full report.
Digitimes Research estimates that in 2014 global tablet shipments will reach 289 million units [Dec 31, 2013]
China white-box makers add extra value to tablets as cost reduction is no longer possible [DIGITIMES Research, Jan 16, 2014]
China white-box players have not been able to lower their Wi-Fi-based tablets’ prices since the third quarter of 2013 because there is no room for further reductions in their BOM costs.
The average BOM cost for a white-box tablet – most of which adopted a dual-core processors – stood at about US$25 as of the fourth quarter of 2013. Dual-core processor pricing could not drop any further, as their average prices came to about US$4, only less than US$1 higher than that of a single-core one.
Memory and 7-inch TN LCD panels are the two key components that account for major shares of white-box tablet BOM costs. However, most panel suppliers have been only willing to upgrade specifications instead of dropping their quotes, and therefore, white-box players have been left with upgrading their devices with better panels without an option of reducing the panel cost.
While cost reduction is no longer a feasible way to attract consumers, many white-box players have turned to push tablets with phone functions to increase their devices’ functionalities and value. The devices also provide higher gross margins for vendors.
Digitimes Research estimates that currently, 80% of white-box tablets are available in countries other than China, because white-box tablets with phone functions have seen rising demand in Russia and other markets in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia since the second half of 2013.
China white-box players’ partnerships with regional brand vendors in emerging markets have also helped raise local consumers’ demand for tablets with phone functions.
In the first half of 2013, most white-box tablets with phone functions adopted China-based Allwinner Technology’s solution which combined an entry-level single-core processor with a discrete baseband module. However, many white-box device makers have turned to MediaTek solutions for their tablets since the second half of 2013 after the Taiwan-based chipmaker also integrated a baseband chip into its tablet processor solution.
MediaTek’s solution is more expensive, but its support for product development and hardware design has given it an upper hand over competitions. Meanwhile, independent design houses (IDHs), which provide white-box players with product design services, also started to design tablets using MediaTek’s smartphone processors in the second half of 2013, which prompted white-box players to adopt MediaTek’s solutions.
Digitimes Research estimates that tablets with phone functions will account for 40% of 7-inch white-box tablet shipments in 2014, up from 20% in 2013.
image

In 2014, smartphones are expected to continue penetrating rapidly into emerging markets such as Russia, India, Indonesia and Latin America, while China’s smartphone shipments will see weakened on-year growth in the year, but still enormous volume. Within the top-10 smartphone vendors in 2013, four of them are from China and in 2014 more China-based vendors are expected to enter the top 10.
Three China-based handset vendors increase component deliveries [DIGITIMES, Dec 11, 2014]
China-based handset vendors Xiaomi Technology, Gionee and Hisense have been taking increasing deliveries of panels and touch panels from suppliers in preparation for launching new models during the peak period before the 2014 Lunar New Year at the end of January, according to Taiwan-based supply chain makers.
Other China-based vendors including Lenovo, Huawei Device and Oppo have begun to follow suit, the sources indicated.
Xiaomi has seen success in marketing its high-end Xiaomi 3, mid-range Xiaomi 2S and entry-level Hong-mi (Red Rice), the sources noted.
Gionee focuses on marketing high-end smartphones priced above CNY2,000 (US$328) through general retail chains without cooperation with China’s three mobile telecom carriers, the sources indicated. Gionee has shipped more than two million smartphones a quarter so far in 2013.
Hisense is among several licensed vendors of 4G smartphones and has launched the 5-inch X6T, its first 4G smartphone featuring TD-LTE, LTE-FDD, TD-SCDMA, WCDMA and GSM, on 12 frequency bands, the sources noted. Hisense has taken delivery of components for use in more than one million handsets to be launched before the 2014 Lunar New Year, the sources noted.
China market: Xiaomi lowers price for Hongmi smartphone [DIGITIMES, Jan 7, 2014]
China-based vendor Xiaomi Technology has reduced the retail price for its budget TD-SCDMA smartphone, the Hongmi, launched in August 2013, from CNY799 (US$132) to CNY699, heralding upcoming competition in the Android smartphone segment in China, according to industry watchers.
Rival vendor Huawei is likely to counteract by slashing the prices of its Honor-branded budget smartphones, while other local brands in China are also expected to follow suit soon, said the observers.
Optimizing its policy of offering smartphones with high hardware specifications and yet at low prices, Xiaomi has managed to ramp up its shipments to over three million units a month and is expected to ship over 40 million smartphones in 2014, the sources estimated. [According to Xiaomi: “7.2 million devices … in 2012 and 18.7 million …bought in 2013. … for 2014 – the CEO expects forty million Xiamoi smartphones to be bought”]
Asustek expected to ship 2014 target of 5 million smartphones [DIGITIMES, Jan 7, 2014]
Asustek Computer unveiled three ZenFone-series smartphones for the opening of CES 2013. Viewing that ZenFone models have comparatively high price-performance ratios, Asustek will be able to hit its target shipments of five million smartphones for 2014, and is likely to ship 8-10 million units, according to market analysts.
The three ZenFone models will initially launch in the Taiwan, China and Southeast Asia markets in March at contract-free retail prices of US$99 for the 4-inch model, US$149 for the 5-inch, and US$199 for the 6-inch.
All three models are equipped with Intel Atom processors and Asustek will launch 3-4 models also with Atom processors in the second half of 2014, the sources indicated.
Since Intel has offered incentives to attract PC vendors to adopt its platforms for smartphones, Asustek is expected to procure Atom processors at discount prices and receive subsidies from Intel for marketing the devices, the sources said.
Asustek likely to release smartphone orders to China ODMs in 2H14, says paper [DIGITIMES, Jan 15, 2014]
Asustek Computer does not rule out the possibility of tying up with handset ODMs in China for the production of smartphones in the second half of 2014, the Chinese-language Economic Daily News (EDN) has quoted company CEO Jerry Shen as saying.
After unveiling five new models at the recently concluded CES 2014, Asustek plans to launch another five smartphones in the second half of the year, and therefore it needs more ODMs to support production, Shen was quoted as indicating.
The three ZenFone-series smartphones out of the five models unveiled by Asustek at CES 2014, with displays sized in 4-, 5-, and 6-inch, will be available for US$99, US$149 and US$199 unlocked, respectively, and are designed to take on China-based rivals in the entry-level smartphone segment.
The possible switch of orders to China-based ODMs may affect its current production partners in Taiwan, including Wistron and Pegatron, said the paper.
Digitimes Research: Asustek ZenFone smartphones have lower price-performance ratios than comparable models from China [Jan 17, 2014]
Asustek Computer unveiled three ZenFone-series smartphones at CES 2014 and will initially launch the models in the Taiwan, China and Southeast Asia markets in March with prices comparable to low-cost models offered by China-based Xiaomi Technology and Huawei. But the price-performance ratios of the ZenFones will be still lower than rival models from China-based vendors due to the use of different marketing channels, according to Digitimes Research.
China-based vendors such as Huawei and Coolpad have been duplicating the business model initiated by Xiaomi by introducing entry-level models with higher hardware specifications and marketing the gadgets mainly through the Internet.
Leveraging subsidies offered by telecom operators, Asustek has been able to lower prices for its ZenFone models to levels comparable to those offered by Xiaomi, Huawei and Coolpad, but the price-performance ratios are lower than of the Hongmi smartphone from Xiaomi, the Honor 3C from Huawei and the Great God F1 from Coolpad, due to markup costs added by channel operators in China selling the ZenFones.
Due to the lower price-performance ratios, Asustek’s goal of shipping over five million smartphones in 2014 through a low-pricing model remains hard to achieve, commented Digitimes Research.
This article is an excerpt from a Chinese-language Digitimes Research report. Click here if you are interested in receiving more information about the content and price of a translated version of the full report.
Total: ~289+ million
Apple: 80-90 million
Non-Apple brand vendors: ~105+ million
– Samsung: 60-70 million
Whitebox vendors: ~104 million image
Apple, Samsung expected to ship 80-90 million, 60-70 million tablets in 2014, say sources [DIGITIMES, Jan 17, 2014]
Apple and Samsung Electronics will remain as the global top-two tablet vendors in 2014 with expected shipments of 80-90 million and 60-70 million units, respectively, according to Taiwan-based supply chain makers.
Samsung’s recent launch of its 12.2-inch model is expected to propel Apple to accelerate development of large-size iPads. Market sources indicated that Apple is likely to release a 12.9-inch model by the end of the third quarter at the earliest.
The two vendors are also expected to continue rolling out new versions of their existing models.
Samsung is also likely to launch more Galaxy Lite models, with prices going down as low as US$129, the sources indicated, adding that Samsung’s tablet shipments in 2014 are expected to reach 60-70 million units compared to 40 million shipped in 2013.
Meanwhile, Apple reportedly has asked its production partners and component suppliers to develop new models of 7.9- and 9.7-inch tablets, added the sources.
Foxconn expected to ship 55-60 million tablets in 2014, say Taiwan makers [DIGITIMES, Jan 16, 2014]
Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) shipped 50 million tablets to become the largest Taiwan-based ODM in 2013 and is expected to ship 55-60 million units to maintain the leading status in 2014, according to supply chain makers.
Foxconn is the main OEM for iPads and has undertaken ODM production of Amazon tablets, the sources noted.
Pegatron, with orders for iPad, Surface and tablets launched by Asustek Computer, shipped 25 million units in 2013 and is expected to remain as the second-largest ODM with shipments of 25-28 million units in 2014, the sources indicated.
With Lenovo and Acer being major clients, Compal Electronics shipped seven million tablets in 2013. With potential OEM orders for iPad mini with Retina display and additional ODM orders from Amazon, Compal is likely to ship 14 million tablets in 2014, the sources estimated.
Quanta Computer shipped 15-16 million tablets in 2013, of which a large portion were Nexus models for Google, the sources noted. Although Quanta may obtain OEM orders for a 12.9-inch iPad, shipments in 2014 will be low volume, the sources indicated. Therefore, Quanta’s 2014 tablet shipments are expected to remain at 15-16 million units.
Digitimes Research: Non-Apple brand vendors to ship 105 million tablets in 2014 [Nov 19, 2013]
Global tablet shipments are expected to reach 289 million units in 2014, up 23.6% on year. The growth, however, will be weaker than that for smartphones due to the fact that the tablet market has already entered the maturity stage, according to Digitimes Research’s latest figures.
In 2014, non-Apple first-tier brand vendors’ products are expected to have more room for price cuts, making their products even more competitive in China than their white-box competitors. The lower pricing means retailers will be more eager to promote their products. The gap in terms of functionality between Google’s official Android operating system and Android Open Source Project (used mostly by China white-box vendors) are also expected to be widen. As a result, the non-Apple first-tier vendors’ combined shipments are expected to grow dramatically to 105 million units in 2014, slightly surpassing China white-box vendors’ combined shipments of 104 million units, according to estimates by Digitimes Research.
Although the fifth-generation iPad (Air) is expected to attract consumers and stimulate replacement demand, the device’s high pricing are expected to limit iPad series products’ shipment growth in 2014 with the volume to reach only 80 million units.
As for brand vendors’ rankings, Apple and Samsung Electronics will remain in the top two in 2014. Since Samsung will adopt more aggressive marketing and pricing strategies in 2014, its shipments will reach 52.5 million units, reducing its gap with the market leader Apple. Lenovo, as the largest PC vendor worldwide and with advantages in its home market of China, is expected to ship 9.5 million units in 2014 to take third place in the tablet market.
Having failed to obtain orders for the next-generation Google Nexus tablets, Asustek Computer is expected to step up promoting its own-brand tablets, and it will ship nine million units in 2014, becoming the fourth largest vendor.
Acer will have a strong presence in entry-level segment, shipping 6.7 million tablets in 2014 to take sixth place, while Google will be the fifth largest vendor. Amazon‘s [5.45 million units in 2013 #5 with that in 2013] and Microsoft‘s shipments [max ~2-3 million of Surface Pro and ??? of Surface] will stay flat or grow only slightly on year.
Digitimes Research expects 7-inch models to remain as the mainstream size for branded tablets in 2014 with shipments set to reach 89.1 million units. But the segment’s share of total tablet shipments will drop below 50%. Brand vendors are expected to place more emphasis on 8-inch models as they look to avoid fierce competition in the 7-inch segment, which is crowded with low-price and white-box products. Shipments to the 8-inch segment are expected to reach 30 million units in 2014, triple the volume in 2013 and surpassing 10-inch models’ 25.4 million units.
As for Taiwan ODMs, their shipments will hit 117 million units in 2014, accounting only for 63% of the global total, down 5.2pp on year. The share will decline because Samsung and Lenovo, the second and the third largest vendors, are making most of their tablets internally.
To seek lower manufacturing quotes and to diversify risks, brand vendors are expected to further divide their tablet orders among ODMs. Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) and Pegatron Technology will remain as the top two ODMs for tablets in 2014. With more orders coming from Apple and Asustek, Pegatron will see significant tablet shipment growth in 2014, narrowing its gap with Foxconn. Compal Electronics is expected to surpass Quanta Computer to become the third-largest table ODM, thanks to orders from Apple and its acquisition of Compal Communication.
This article is an excerpt from a Digitimes Research Special Report (2014 global tablet demand forecast). Visit our latest Special reports.

More information (going back to end of July 2013) which is directly related to the possible changes on the 2014 markets in terms of 2014 will be the last year of “free ride” in the smartphone and tablet spaces for ARM-based competitors of Intel – at least what Intel is insisting again [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Jan 17, 2014]:

Nokia should introduce an Android forked smartphone for the $75-120 range in order to enhance its Asha Software Platform strategy

January 17, 2014 11:57 am / Leave a comment

In order to increase its presence in the sub $120 market (see Lumia 520 for Rs. 8850, i.e. US$ 144 in India, and US$121.5 in China) it is obvious that Nokia should take the next step in its Asha Software Platform Strategy with its recent stance being the following one:

image
More information: Q3’13 smartphone and overall mobile phone markets: Android smartphones surpassed 80% of the market, with Samsung increasing its share to 32.1% against Apple’s 12.1% only; while Nokia achieved a strong niche market position both in “proper” (Lumia) and “de facto” (Asha Touch) smartphones [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Nov 14, 2013]

That is a definite gap exists in Nokia offerings between US$75 and US$120. Also this gap could only be filled with an Android forked offering only. Therefore we should (first time during the whole existence of this trend-tracking blog) take seriously the ongoing rumors about such an offering, the so called Nokia Normandy project., despite all uncertainties of not only the Microsoft takeover of the Nokia device business, but also the uncertainties about the next CEO of Microsoft and the company strategy in smartphones which will come as the result of that selection.

I should include here the latest summary about that from Wikipedia as it “is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia’s deletion policy”:
Nokia Normandy [Wikipedia excerpt, Jan 17, 2014]

The Normandy, previously known as ‘Project N’, the ‘Asha on Linux project’ and “MView”, is a low-end Android device under development by Nokia.

Described as a potential “game changer”,[1] the project has garnered substantial interest from the media, including coverage from New York Times,[2] Engadget,[3]Stuff,[4] Forbes,[5] Gizmodo,[6] The Verge,[7] CNET[8] and The Times of India.[9]

Background

Despite choosing the Windows Phone operating system for its smartphones (The Lumia series), Nokia had experimented with the Android platform in the past. Images of a Nokia N9 running Android 2.3 were leaked in 2011. They were believed to be likely genuine, as Steven Elop had mentioned Nokia had considered Android in the past.[10]

On 13 September 2013, the New York Times writer Nick Wingfield revealed that Nokia had been testing the Android operating system on its Lumia hardware, and a second project, known as ‘Asha on Linux’ used a forked version of Android without Google services.[2]

The Chinese technology site CTechnology revealed that, despite the announced merger of Nokia’s handset division with Microsoft, development of the project was continuing until November and 10,000 prototype units had been manufactured by Foxconn containing a Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 8225Q chip.[11]

However, a new report by Tom Warren from The Verge on 11 December 2013 showed the Asha-like device, codenamed ‘Normandy’ for the first time, stating that despite the finalisation of the acquisition, development of the device is continuing.[7] AllThingsD suggested that Microsoft may not actually axe development on the device.[12]

A further report by CTechnology on the 14th December claims that the device development had been halted, along with an Android-based 7-inch Snapdragon 400 tablet. The two projects were, it was claimed, to have been created by Nokia’s CTO division which is not being acquired by Microsoft, with Peter Skillman, the head of UX Design, at the helm of the UI design. The report claims wearable devices are the new focus of the CTO division.[13][14][15]

A further leak by @evleaks showed a press image with several colour options for the phone.[16]

According to NokiaPowerUser, the device is dual-sim with a 4-inch display, stating that the model number is RM-980, and has a 640×360 resolution.[17] In a second report, they suggest the device may be a member of the Asha range as team was headed by Egil Kvaleberg (from Smarterphone) and UI lead by Peter Skillman (who worked on the Asha Platform‘s Swipe UI).[18]

A tweet by @evleaks on 31 December 2013 stated that “The reports of Normandy’s death have been greatly exaggerated“.[19]

A leak on the ITHome technology website showed a blurred image of the phone, and the app drawer of its’ UI in operation, confirming it is a dual sim device. However, no Nokia logos were found on the device.[20]

@evleaks later posted screenshots of the UI, showing the lock screen and Skype in action.[21]

The device later showed up on the AnTuTu benchmark software as Nokia A110, with KitKat 4.4.1, a 5MP camera and an 854 x 480 display.[22]

Two new photos of the Engineering prototype were once again leaked, and the device is widely expected to be released at MWC 2014.[23] One shows a different app launcher to one in a previous leak, suggesting it is a placeholder.[24]

On 13 January 2014, a press photo showing the tile-like UI of the home screen was leaked,[25] and was accompanied by a screenshot of the Asha platform‘s Fastlane-style notification centre the next day.[26]

According to Eldar Murtazin, Microsoft is not keen on the idea, mentioning there are “too many politics” around the project. He claims, if it is released at all, it will have to be in February, before Nokia’s devices acquisition is finalised.[27]

Another source, speaking to TechnoBuffalo, in contrast, suggested Microsoft may use the device as a trojan horse to increase Windows Phone adoption.[27]

References

  1. Nokia Normandy surfaces online: A game changer in Android domain&#63
  2. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/behind-microsoft-deal-the-specter-of-a-nokia-android-phone/?_r=0
  3. Rumored Nokia Normandy prototype surfaces on Twitter, reveals little
  4. Nokia Normandy – an Android phone with Lumia DNA | Stuff
  5. Microsoft Should Embrace Nokia’s Android Project – Forbes
  6. Nokia’s Alleged Normandy Android Phone Leaks | Gizmodo UK
  7. Staff, Verge (2013-12-10). “This is Nokia’s Android phone”. The Verge. Retrieved 2014-01-08.
  8. Nokia’s version of Android looks sleek in leaked pics | CNET UK
  9. Nokia Android phone Normandy’s photo leaked – The Times of India
  10. Savov, Vlad. (24 June 2011) Nokia’s Android flirtations revealed. Engadget.com. Retrieved on 2013-07-14.
  11. Nokia still working on Android phone, won’t cancel until November. Foxconn already made 10K prototypes. Unwired View (2013-09-19). Retrieved on 2013-11-27.
  12. “Why Microsoft Might Not Kill Nokia’s Android Phone – Ina Fried – Mobile”. AllThingsD. 2013-12-11. Retrieved 2014-01-08.
  13. “Nokia abandons Peter Skillman led Android adaptation plans, refocuses on wearables, smart glasses for 2015”. Unwired View. 2013-12-16. Retrieved 2014-01-08.
  14. Swanner, Nate (2013-12-16). “Nokia Android phone, along with other projects, might be shelved”. Android Community. Retrieved 2014-01-08.
  15. ^ CTECH (2013-12-14). “诺基亚已放弃 Android 手机/平板计划，未来将力推穿戴式设备 | C科技”. Ctechcn.com. Retrieved 2014-01-08.
  16. “New Nokia Normandy leak shows the Android device in several colors”. PhoneDog. 2013-12-23. Retrieved 2014-01-08.
  17. “Dual-Sim RM-980 may be Nokia Normandy with 4-inch display | NPU”. Nokiapoweruser.com. 2013-12-11. Retrieved 2014-01-08.
  18. “More details about Nokia’s “Project N”. Why Android, the Team & missed oppurtunity. | NPU”. Nokiapoweruser.com. 2013-12-24. Retrieved 2014-01-08.
  19. “Twitter / evleaks: The reports of Normandy’s death”. Twitter.com. Retrieved 2014-01-08.
  20. “Nokia Normandy Android smartphone reportedly shown in new leak”. BGR. 2014-01-02. Retrieved 2014-01-08.
  21. “Latest Nokia Normandy leak includes screenshots of custom Android software”. PhoneDog. Retrieved 2014-01-08.
  22. “Nokia Normandy shows up on AnTuTu. 5 MP Cam, 854 x 480 display, running Android KitKat 4.4.1. | NPU”. Nokiapoweruser.com. Retrieved 2014-01-08.
  23. “Engineering prototype of Nokia Normandy leaks in a live photo – GSMArena.com news”. Gsmarena.com. Retrieved 2014-01-12.
  24. Image of Nokia’s Android phone prototype Normandy leaked [Update with Android skin UI] – Neowin
  25. Nokia ‘Normandy’ budget Android phone purportedly leaked in multiple images – NDTV Gadgets
  26. Richard Goodwin (2014-01-13). “What is Nokia’s Normandy Project? It’s Android, Jim. But not as we know it…”. Know Your Mobile. Retrieved 2014-01-17.
  27. “Nokia Normandy Android Phone Ready, If Politics Don’t Get in the Way, Sources Say”. TechnoBuffalo. Retrieved 2014-01-17.

2014 will be the last year of “free ride” in the smartphone and tablet spaces for ARM-based competitors of Intel – at least what Intel is insisting again

January 17, 2014 9:47 am / Leave a comment

With 2013 performance of only 10 million tablet chip sets (for Windows mostly) Intel is still confident in its ability to deliver 40 million of those (with increased Android portion) in 2014. To achieve this they will be doing a lot of enabling across the industry to take the Bay Trail-based tablet BOM cost down to an equivalent level. They expect that the company’s overall margin will be hit just by 1.5% because of this required in 2014 effort. They are saying that Intel will be safe from 2015 on as moving to 14nm process technology with next-generation (even in terms of micro-architecture) Broxton and SOFIA SoCs for tablet and smartphone devices. They are basing this statement on their inherent “transistor density” advantage against TSMC from that point in time on, despite some analysts’ opinion of the economy of scale advantage of TSMC in terms of the number of wafers produced.

Meanwhile the possible direction of leading OEMs got a hint with New Acer CEO introduced to the media [Formosa EnglishNews, Jan 14, 2014]

In a press conference today, new Acer CEO Jason Chen said he looks forward to transforming the struggling Taiwanese computer maker. Chen was joined by Chairman Stan Shih, who recently rejoined Acer in an effort to resurrect the company he founded. Acer Chairman Stan Shih appeared with new CEO Jason Chen. They smiled broadly and wore matching pink shirts at today’s press conference.Stan Shih Acer Chairman I look forward to Jason being an outstanding performer and soon eclipsing me. Reporters will forget about Stan.Chen was lured away from TSMC. His expertise is in marketing, and he was the youngest ever TSMC senior vice president. His resume also includes prior stints with Intel and IBM.Morris Chang TSMC ChairmanI think it’s a good thing that TSMC can train people to work and lead other com

With media generally reporting that Acer’s biggest mistake was its too early and too heavy bet on ultrabooks it is clear that OEMs will take a very cautious approach with Intel’s efforts to decrease the Bay-Trail based tablet costs down on the BOM level, as it is exactly what happened with ultrabooks. Instead the will try to solidify their tablet market position with ARM-based tablets in all segments of the tablet market, from the lowest cost upto the premium. Moreover, Jason Chen’s appointment to the CEO position of Acer is also showing that even for ongoing efforts OEMs need a very detailed and deep understanding of the SoC manufacturing and even the process technologies. Take note of Jason Chen’s history of employment in order to understand that:

  • TSMC: 2005-2013
  • Intel: 1991-2005
  • IBM: 1991-1998

In other regards we only know that Acer to start new operation strategy in April to focus on BYOC (Build Your Own Cloud) [DIGITIMES, Jan 13, 2014] and that “In the future, all of Acer’s businesses including desktop, notebook and tablet will involve the BYOC platform and it is hoping to strengthen its product lines through the services.” It will be interesting to watch what that means as my previous conclusion was Leading PC vendors of the past: Go enterprise or die! [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Nov 7, 2013].

Now back to the Intel related information in terms of details in their earnings call. Note before that the correlation of Intel and Microsoft stock prices (as well that the stock market was absolutely not happy with Intel results and especially with the “flat 2014” outlook):

image

The company’s stance for 2014 is indeed not rosy as Intel to reduce global workforce by five percent in 2014 [Reuters, Jan 17, 2014].

From: Intel’s CEO Discusses Q4 2013 Results – Earnings Call Transcript [Seeking Alpha, Jan 16, 2014]
Inserted slides are from Investor Meeting – Stacy Smith (CFO) [Nov 21, 2013] while the acompanying text is from Intel Shares Mobile Progress, Priorities and Product Pipeline at Annual Investor Day [Technology@Intel, Nov 25, 2013] if reference is not put underneath

[On transistor density and wafer cost]

Mark Lipacis – Jefferies

Thanks for taking my question. At the Analyst Day, you addressed your view on transistor density and your expectation for leadership on that vector, but I have to say this discussing that idea with investors is a consensus view that seems to be that Intel has an inherent wafer cost disadvantage that relative to TSMC that neutralizes or more than neutralizes your transistor density advantage and the argument is that TSMC ships more wafers and therefore has more better purchasing power than you and its lower labor cost, so net-net, they have just a big huge advantage of wafer cost that you should have a hard to, too hard of a time to overcome. So my question is do you think that’s a fair view. Can you help us talk to the relative elements of the wafer cost and how you think you can compare? Any kind of help that you give us on the cost dimension would be extremely helpful. Thank you.

image
From: CES: Process Will Still Win in Mobile, Says Intel’s Eul [Barrons.com, Jan 9, 2014]
Eul points out that Qualcomm, and other competitors such as Nvidia (NVDA) and Broadcom (BRCM), all of whom are dependent on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to actually make the chips they design, will run into a problem as Taiwan Semi’s technology stops scaling.
Intel had made the point at the analyst day presentation, and Eul repeated it: As TSMC moves from 28 nanometer to 20 nanometer, it will run into a problem at the subsequent step, 16 nanometer, where TSMC will not add any real reduction in transistor size. That, says Eul, means that 16-nanometer parts a few years from now will be stuck at a 20-nanometer feature size while intel presumably zooms ahead to 10 nanometer by that time.
And what that means is that, unable to scale the density of a chip as Intel can, Qualcomm and Nvidia and Broadcom and the others will not be able to integrate as many parts as Intel on a single semiconductor die.
And so to those who point out that Intel hasn’t yet released its integrated baseband chip, Sofia, mentioned above, Eul contends the company will have the last laugh in a few years’ time as Qualcomm and the rest hitting a scaling wall.

Brian Krzanich – Chief Executive Officer

You know I think the first thing to remember is that what really counts in all of this is transistor cost and what we really talk about in our Moore’s Law of Curves and when we talk about transistor density is driving a consistent cost reduction of the transistors and so wafer cost is one segment of that. I’m not going to comment on you know TSMC’s wafer cost versus our wafer cost but we feel confident that our relative level of scaling and our internal wafer cost are such that we believe we have a leadership position in transistor cost.

When you’re talking about any product whatever it is, a logic product that’s a low-end microprocessor for wearable or internet of things or high-end Xeon server. You’re talking about the number of case and hence the number of transistors required to put that logic device together, it doesn’t matter whose technology it’s on to some extent. It doesn’t matter what node and so the more cost effective those transistors are whether it’s 500 million or 3 billion the lower the product cost there is and that’s really what we focus on and why we focus on transistor cost. So I think we stand by our what we said at the investor meeting.

[On tablets]

Brian Krzanich: Our disclosure in November of a new smartphone and tablet road map that will include SoFIA our first IA SSD with integrated comps later this year is further evident that we’re innovating and bringing products to market at faster pace. Looking ahead 2014 will be an exciting year as we build further on this new foundation. We have established a goal to grow our tablet volumes to more than 40 million units. Within an emphasis on the value segment. As we’re finishing 2013 with more than 10 million units and a strong book of design wins we’re off to a good start.

Stacy Smith: In the tablet market, we launched the Bay Trail SoC and have started to expand our footprint and market signature in this growing market.

image
The 4X Tablet Campaign: This year, Intel increased its focus on tablets with key design wins and the introduction of Bay Trail.  Next year, Intel plans to increase tablet volumes by 4X!  Eul signaled a rich pipeline of tablet and phablet design wins for Bay Trail including Android and Windows devices spanning price points from premium to sub $99 products from leading OEMs and the China tech ecosystem. He also said industry leading performance, competitive battery life, cost-reduced SOCs and unique features like 64 bit will help drive growth. Intel gave a first-time demo of the performance gains achieved with a 64 bit Bay Trail system running Windows and showed a 64 bit kernel running on an Android tablet.

Note the details about the 2014 tablet market of ~289+ million units in the 2014 will be the last year of making sufficient changes for Microsoft’s smartphone and tablet strategies, and those changes should be radical if the company wants to suceed with its devices and services strategy [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Jan 17, 2014] post of mine. The 40 million target of Intel is therefore less than 14% of that.

[regarding: So on the tablet strategy to get the 40 million you’re saying it’s going to be a 1.5 percentage hit.

CFO Commentary on Fourth-Quarter and Full Year 2013 Results
2014 Outlook
Gross Margin Reconciliation: 2013 to 2014 Outlook (59.8% to 60% +/- a few points)

    • – 1.5 points: Tablet impact

    Let’s say you guys get into the second half of the year and you’re not quite to the 40 million if it’s a pretty significant short fall. Would you consider canning that strategy I guess I’m just wondering what the commitment is if the volumes aren’t there but the cost is there by the end of the year?]

    Brian Krzanich: This isn’t a price reduction as normal price reduction would be; it’s not where you are just simply reducing. It’s truly a BOM cost equalizer and remember a lot of our 40 million tablets in ’14 will be based on Bay Trail. Bay Trail was originally designed for Avoton-based PC segments and the upper end tablet [and all Windows]. And so it’s what we are doing here is doing a BOM cast delta relative to the, what the mid and lower end tablets require. And so those are things like Bay Trail may require more layers of a printed circuit board for the board itself, more components on the board and tighter power management controls and things like that. We have a whole program to reduce those throughout the year. So that gives us confidence that as we go through the year, the BOM cast delta will shrink, but if the volume didn’t show up for some reason and I am not going to say that, that’s what’s going to happen, but I am confident it will, but if it didn’t it’s on a per unit basis. And so the spending on that contra would be reduced equivalently.

    Stacy Smith: And I would just add as Brian said we are doing a lot of enabling across the industry to take the BOM cast out in equivalent. These are costs at the system level not at our chip level and it will vary a lot by SKU, but to give you a sense for a Bay Trail platform from the beginning of the year to the end of the year we think that, that BOM penalty drops by more than half. And so it kind of gets better out in time. And then when we get to the Broxton generation we think it’s de minimis.

    Brian Krzanich: Both Broxton and SoFIA are just specifically designed to eliminate that delta.

    image
    Say “hello” to SoFIA:     By the end of 2014, Intel will deliver a new integrated Atom processor + communications solution for entry and value smartphones and tablets, code-named SoFIA. In his presentation, Eul highlighted that Intel’s Infineon wireless assets make the company an “incumbent” in the mobile phone market, shipping more than 360M mobile platforms a year spanning 2G and 3G solutions. He said SoFIA builds on the proven 3G communications platform to deliver a competitive and highly integrated, IA-based mobile solution aimed at the fast-growing market for entry smartphones and tablets. The 3G version of SoFIA is expected by the end of 2014, and Eul said an LTE version would follow in the first half of 2015.
    Accelerated Mobile Roadmap: While specific product details will be saved for a later date, Eul signaled a robust pipeline of new Atom processors and multi-comms solutions for 2014 and beyond to address devices spanning market segments from entry to performance smartphones and tablets, an approach he called “market-oriented pragmatism.” In addition to SoFIA, Eul noted:
    …
      • Broxton – in 2015 Intel plans to deliver a 14nm, 64 bit SOC based on a new, next generation Atom architecture (Goldmont) targeted for hero devices. Broxton is being designed for pairing with Intel’s next generation LTE solutions.

      [regarding: If we look at tablets and smartphone, what type of units do you need to reach for that business to stop having a material impact in gross margin from is 10 points higher utilization rates and excluding the contra revenue impact and that’s it? So just looking at the 40 million units target for this year, what type of volume do you need to get in order for gross margin to start appreciating from the west of the business if you exclude the contra revenue impact?]

      Brian Krzanich: Yes, it’s hard to say. I mean, I will bridge back to our strategy here. Our strategy is that we are going to use our process technology leads. We will have leadership products that also are competitive or maybe even leadership in terms of cost and I showed some data at the investor meeting that just kind of showed the die size as we progress from Bay Trail to Broxton to SoFIA and so you can get a sense of the kinds of cost structure that we are going to have on a per unit basis. I don’t think it causes on a percentage basis. Yes, I can’t – I am not envisioning if this causes the gross margin percentage to go up, but you can definitely get to a space once we get through these contra enabling dollars where every unit we sell is accretive on a gross margin dollars per unit. It’s utilizing factories that we have in place for PCs. And so it’s a nice adder of that gross margin dollar per unit standpoint.

      [regarding: Bay Trail Android tablets]

      Brian Krzanich: Most of the Bay Trail Android tablets really start showing up more in Q2 than in Q1 and that’s again purely you know remember we made a shift, an original program for Bay Trail was all Windows. As we came into the midpoint of the year we sandbox [ph] shift and make it Windows and Android and so you know our OEM partners as well are targeting more towards Q2 and it’s just when you do you go and start putting back in that back to school event which is a next seasonal place where upside usually occur.

      [regarding: On the smartphone or on tablet space, I think it is true that Intel has a manufacturing lead, but do you think your cost reduction efforts and then the Moore’s Law advantages ever progressed faster than the ASP declines in the space. In other words, do you think Intel can be sustainably profitable in the mobile space which is maturing?]

      Brian Krzanich: Yes, we absolutely do. You saw at the investor meeting products like SoFIA, which really are going to be put on to 14-nanometer are fully integrated all the way through with the 3G option or an LTE option and that LTE is with carrier aggregation. Those kinds of products we believe are very, very cost competitive in fact leading from a cost position. In addition, we don’t talk a lot about, but we are already in that low cost Asia market. We are inch and then we are working with ODMs there. That’s actually where a lot of the innovations coming out of for some of these cost reductions on tablets and where we are getting the cost reduction ideas. So we are in that market now. We sold out of that Shenzhen low cost market in Q4. We will continue through it – through 2014 and with products like SoFIA on leading edge technology, we are very comfortable that we can get into those very low price points.

      The Cortex-A53 as the Cortex-A7 replacement core is succeeding as a sweet-spot IP for various 64-bit high-volume market SoCs to be delivered from H2 CY14 on

      December 23, 2013 8:42 pm / 3 Comments on The Cortex-A53 as the Cortex-A7 replacement core is succeeding as a sweet-spot IP for various 64-bit high-volume market SoCs to be delivered from H2 CY14 on

      … not suprisingly as it is built on the same micro-architecture. Even Intel will manufacture Cortex-A53 based SoCs for Altera (Stratix 10 FPGA SoCs) in 2015 on its leading edge Tri-Gate (FinFET) 14nm process.

      With MediaTek MT6592-based True Octa-core superphones are on the market to beat Qualcomm Snapdragon 800-based ones [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Dec 21, 2013] MediaTek will follow up with a 4G LTE MT6595 version in January, and with a 64-bit version based on Cortex-A53 instead of Cortex-A7 in H2 CY14. In this way it will be able to compete head-on with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 in the most lucrative high-volume market.

      imageAccording to 大陸4G啟動 聯發科快攻 [Commercial Times, Dec 10, 2013]: “MediaTek MT6590’s first 4G modem chip is expected to begin shipping next month, in addition to 4G systems integration single chip (SoC) MT6595 has appeared earlier this month in the customer’s specification sheet, and 8-core as the main design, not difficult to see MediaTek ambition to expand high-end market.”

      MediaTek delivering 4G LTE chips for verification, say paper [DIGITIMES, Dec 18, 2013]

      MediaTek reportedly has delivered its first 4G LTE chip, the MT6590, to potential clients for verification. The chips are expected to begin generating revenues for the IC design house in the first quarter of 2014, according to a Chinese-language Liberty Times report. The MT6590 supports five modes and 10 frequency bands.

      The news echoes earlier remarks by MediaTek president Hsieh Ching-chiang stating the company plans to launch 4G chips at year-end 2013 with end-market devices powered by the 4G chips to be available in the first quarter of 2014, the paper added.

      Citing data from JPMorgan Chase, the paper said shipments of MediaTek’s first 8-core chip, the MT6592, are higher than expected and shipment momentum is likely to continue into the first quarter of 2014.

      The latest news: Chipset vendors to showcase 64-bit smartphone solutions at CES 2014 [DIGITIMES, Dec 23, 2013]

      Chipset players including Qualcomm, Nvidia, Marvell Technology and Broadcom all are expected to showcase 64-bit processors for smartphone applications at the upcoming CES 2014 trade show, a move which will add pressure on Taiwan-based MediaTek in its efforts to expand market share with its newly released 8-core CPUs, according to industry sources.

      Qualcomm has already unveiled a 64-bit-chip, the Snapdragon 410, and is expected to begin sampling in the first half of 2014, according to the company.

      Nvidia, which is familiar with 64-bit computing architectures, is expected to start volume production of 64-bit chips for smartphones in the first half of 2014 at the earliest, said industry sources.

      Marvell and Broadcom are also expected to highlight their 64-bit chips at CES 2014, kicking off competition in the 64-bit chipset segment, note the sources.

      Meanwhile, the vendors, as well as China-based chipset suppliers Spreadtrum Communications and RDA Microelectronics, will also exert efforts to take market share from MediaTek in the entry-level to mid-range chipset segment in 2014, commented the sources.

      From: 64-bit smartphones to be ushered in 2014, say sources [DIGITIMES, Dec 11, 2013]

      … Qualcomm has also claimed that the Snapdragon 410 will support all major operating systems, including Android, Windows Phone and Firefox OS and that Qualcomm Reference Design versions of the processor will be available to enable rapid development time and reduce OEM R&D, designed to provide a comprehensive mobile device platform. However, the observers noted that the Snapdragon 410 chips are aiming at the mid-range LTE smartphone segment, particularly the sub-CNY1,000 (US$165) sector in China. The launch of the mid-range 64-bit Snapdragon chips also aims to widen its lead against Taiwan-based rival MediaTek in the China market, the sources added. Qualcomm said the Snapdragon 410 processor is expected to be in commercial devices in the second half of 2014. …

      Samsung Electronics is also believed to be working on its own 64-bit CPUs in house and expected to launch 64-bit capable flagship models in the first half of 2014 at the earliest, said the observers.

      The 64-bit versions of CPUs from MediaTek, Broadcom and Nvidia are likely to come in late 2014 or in 2015, added the sources.

      Google is expected to accelerate the upgrading of its Android platform, providing an environment for software developers to work on related 64-bit applications, commented the sources.

      Taiwan IC suppliers developing chips for MediaTek smartphone solutions [DIGITIMES, Dec 18, 2013]

      MediaTek’s growing shipments of smartphone solutions, which are expected to top 200 million units in 2013 and 300 million units in 2014, have encouraged Taiwan-based suppliers of LCD driver ICs, power management ICs, ambient light sensors, gyroscopes, touchscreen controller ICs and MEMS microphones to develop chips that can be incorporated into these smartphone solutions, according to industry sources.

      MediaTek has been focusing its R&D efforts on developments of 4- and 8-core and 4G CPUs as well as wireless chips in order to maintain its competitiveness, while relying on other IC vendors to complete its smartphone solution platforms, the sources noted.

      With MediaTek’s smartphone solution shipments expected to reach 30 million units a month in 2014, any suppliers which can deliver IC parts for MediaTek’s smartphone platforms will see their revenues and profits grow substantially in 2014, the sources said.

      Qualcomm Technologies Introduces Snapdragon 410 Chipset with Integrated 4G LTE World Mode for High-Volume Smartphones [press release, Dec 9, 2013]

      4G LTE, 64-Bit Processing Expands Qualcomm Technologies’ Global Product Offerings and Reference Design Program

      SAN DIEGO – December 09, 2013 – Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) today announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., has introduced the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 410 chipset with integrated 4G LTE World Mode. The delivery of faster connections is important to the growth and adoption of smartphones in emerging regions, and Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets are poised to address the needs of consumers as 4G LTE begins to ramp in China.

      The new Snapdragon 410 chipsets are manufactured using 28nm process technology. They feature processors that are 64-bit capable along with superior graphics performance with the Adreno 306 GPU, 1080p video playback and up to a 13 Megapixel camera. Snapdragon 410 chipsets integrate 4G LTE and 3G cellular connectivity for all major modes and frequency bands across the globe and include support for Dual and Triple SIM. Together with Qualcomm RF360 Front End Solution, Snapdragon 410 chipsets will have multiband and multimode support. Snapdragon 410 chipsets also feature Qualcomm Technologies’ Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM and NFC functionality, and support all major navigation constellations: GPS, GLONASS, and China’s new BeiDou, which helps deliver enhanced accuracy and speed of Location data to Snapdragon-enabled handsets.

      The chipset also supports all major operating systems, including the Android, Windows Phone and Firefox operating systems. Qualcomm Reference Design versions of the processor will be available to enable rapid development time and reduce OEM R&D, designed to provide a comprehensive mobile device platform. The Snapdragon 410 processor is anticipated to begin sampling in the first half of 2014 and expected to be in commercial devices in the second half of 2014.

      Qualcomm Technologies also announced for the first time the intention to make 4G LTE available across all of the Snapdragon product tiers. The Snapdragon 410 processor gives the 400 product tier several 4G LTE options for high-volume mobile devices, as the third LTE-enabled solution in the product tier. By offering 4G LTE variants to its entry level smartphone lineup, Qualcomm Technologies ensures that emerging regions are equipped for this transition while also having every major 2G and 3G technology available to them. Qualcomm Technologies offers OEMs and operators differentiation through a rich feature set upon which to build innovative high-volume smartphones for budget-conscious consumers.

      “We are excited to bring 4G LTE to highly affordable smartphones at a sub $150 ( ̴ 1,000 RMB) price point with the introduction of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor,” said Jeff Lorbeck, senior vice president and chief operating officer, Qualcomm Technologies, China. “The Snapdragon 410 chipset will also be the first of many 64-bit capable processors as Qualcomm Technologies helps lead the transition of the mobile ecosystem to 64-bit processing.”

      Qualcomm Technologies will release the Qualcomm Reference Design (QRD) version of the Snapdragon 410 processor with support for Qualcomm RF360™ Front End Solution. The QRD program offers Qualcomm Technologies’ leading technical innovation, easy customization options, the QRD Global Enablement Solution which features regional software packages, modem configurations, testing and acceptance readiness for regional operator requirements, and access to a broad ecosystem of hardware component vendors and software application developers. Under the QRD program, customers can rapidly deliver differentiated smartphones to value-conscious consumers. There have been more than 350 public QRD-based product launches to date in collaboration with more than 40 OEMs in 18 countries.

      Note that just 18 days before that there was the news that Qualcomm Technologies Announces Next Generation Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 “Ultra HD” Processor [press release, Nov 20, 2013]

      Mobile Technology Leader Announces its Highest Performance Processor Designed to Deliver the Highest Quality Mobile Video, Camera and Graphics to Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 Tier
      NEW YORK – November 20, 2013 – Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) today announced that its subsidiary, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., introduced the next generation mobile processor of the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 800 tier, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 processor, which is designed to deliver the highest-quality mobile video, imaging and graphics experiences at Ultra HD (4K) resolution, both on device and via Ultra HD TVs. Featuring the new Adreno 420 GPU, with up to 40 percent more graphics processing power than its predecessor, the Snapdragon 805 processor is the first mobile processor to offer system-level Ultra HD support, 4K video capture and playback and enhanced dual camera Image Signal Processors (ISPs), for superior performance, multitasking, power efficiency and mobile user experiences.
      The Snapdragon 805 processor is Qualcomm Technologies’ newest and highest performing Snapdragon processor to date, featuring:
      – Blazing fast apps and web browsing and outstanding performance: Krait 450 quad-core CPU, the first mobile CPU to run at speeds of up to 2.5 GHz per core, plus superior memory bandwidth support of up to 25.6 GB/second that is designed to provide unprecedented multimedia and web browsing performance.
      – Smooth, sharp user interface and games support Ultra HD resolution: The mobile industry’s first end-to-end Ultra HD solution with on-device display concurrent with output to HDTV; features Qualcomm Technologies’ new Adreno 420 GPU, which introduces support for hardware tessellation and geometry shaders, for advanced 4K rendering, with even more realistic scenes and objects, visually stunning user interface, graphics and mobile gaming experiences at lower power.
      – Fast, seamless connected mobile experiences: Custom, efficient integration with either the Qualcomm® Gobi™ MDM9x25 or the Gobi MDM9x35 modem, powering superior seamless connected mobile experiences. The Gobi MDM9x25 chipset announced in February 2013 has seen significant adoption as the first embedded, mobile computing solution to support LTE carrier aggregation and LTE Category 4 with superior peak data rates of up to 150Mbps. Additionally, Qualcomm’s most advanced Wi-Fi for mobile, 2-stream dual-band Qualcomm® VIVE™ 802.11ac, enables wireless 4K video streaming and other media-intensive applications. With a low-power PCIe interface to the QCA6174, tablets and high-end smartphones can take advantage of faster mobile Wi-Fi performance (over 600 Mbps), extended operating range and concurrent Bluetooth connections, with minimal impact on battery life.
      – Ability to stream more video content at higher quality using less power: Support for Hollywood Quality Video (HQV) for video post processing, first to introduce hardware 4K HEVC (H.265) decode for mobile for extremely low-power HD video playback.
      – Sharper, higher resolution photos in low light and advanced post-processing features: First Gpixel/s throughput camera support in a mobile processor designed for a significant increase in camera speed and imaging quality. Sensor processing with gyro integration enables image stabilization for sharper, crisper photos. Qualcomm Technologies is the first to announce a mobile processor with advanced, low-power, integrated sensor processing, enabled by its custom DSP, designed to deliver a wide range of sensor-enabled mobile experiences.
      “Using a smartphone or tablet powered by Snapdragon 805 processor is like having an UltraHD home theater in your pocket, with 4K video, imaging and graphics, all built for mobile,” said Murthy Renduchintala, executive vice president, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and co-president, QCT. “We’re delivering the mobile industry’s first truly end-to-end Ultra HD solution, and coupled with our industry leading Gobi LTE modems and RF transceivers, streaming and watching content at 4K resolution will finally be possible.”
      The Snapdragon 805 processor is sampling now and expected to be available in commercial devices by the first half of 2014.

      The original value proposition was presented in the brief Brian Jeff highlights the ARM® Cortex™-A53 processor [ARMflix YouTube channel, Oct 30, 2012] video as follows

      Brian Jeff highlights the ARM® Cortex™-A53 processor, ARM’s most efficient application processor ever, delivering today’s mainstream smartphone experience in a quarter of the power in the respective process nodes.

      The Top 5 Things to Know about Cortex-A53 [Brian Jeff on ‘ARM Connected Community’, Oct 28, 2013]

      The Cortex-A53 was introduced to the market in October 2012, delivering the ARMv8 instruction set and significantly increased performance in a highly efficient power and area footprint. It is available for licensing now, and will be deployed in silicon in early 2014 by multiple ARM partners. There are a few key aspects of the Cortex-A53 that developers, OEMs, and SoC designers should know:

      1. ARM low power / high efficiency heritage

      The ARM9 is the most licensed processor in ARM’s history with over 250 licenses sold. It identified a very important power/cost sweet spot.The Cortex-A5 (launched in 2009) was designed to fit in the CPU same power and area footprint,

      image    ARM926-based feature phone (Nokia E60).

      while delivering significantly higher performance and power-efficiency, and bring it to modern ARMv7 feature set – software compatibility with the high end of the processor roadmap (then Cortex-A9)

      image

      The Cortex-A53 is built around a simple pipeline, 8 stages long with in-order execution like the Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A5 processors that preceded it. An instruction traversing a simple pipeline requires fewer registers and switches less logic to fetch, decode, issue, execute, and write back the results than a more complex pipeline microarchitecture. Simpler pipelines are smaller and lower power. The high efficiency Cortex-A CPU product line, consisting of Cortex-A5, Cortex-A7, and Cortex-A53, takes a design approach prioritizing efficiency first, then seeking as much performance as possible at the maximum efficiency. The added performance in each successive generation in this series comes from advances in the memory system, increasing dual-issue capability, expanded internal busses, and improved branch prediction.

      2. ARM v8-A Architecture

      The Cortex-A53 is fully compliant with the ARMv8-A architecture, which is the latest ARM architecture and introduces support for 64b operation while maintaining 100% backward compatibility with the broadly deployed ARMv7 architecture. The processor can switch between AArch32 and AArch64 modes of operation to allow 32bit apps and 64bit apps to run together on top of a 64bit operating system. This dual execution state support allows maximum flexibility for developers and SoC designers in managing the rollout of 64bit support in different markets. ARMv8-A brings additional features (more registers, new instructions) that bring increased performance and Cortex-A53 is able to take advantage of these.

      3. Higher performance than Cortex-A9: smaller and more efficient too

      The Cortex-A9 features an out-of-order pipeline, dual issue capability, and a longer pipeline than Cortex-A53 that enables 15% higher frequency operation. However the Cortex-A53 achieves higher single thread performance by pushing a simpler design farther – some of the key factors enabling the performance of the Cortex-A53 include the integrated low latency level 2 cache, the larger 512 entry main TLB, and the complex branch predictor. The Cortex-A9 has set the bar for the high end of the smartphone market through 2012 – by matching and exceeding that level of performance in a smaller footprint and power budget, the Cortex-A53 delivers performance to entry level devices that was previously enjoyed by high-end flagship mobile devices – in a lower power budget and at lower cost. The graph below compares the single thread performance of the high efficiency Cortex-A processors with the Cortex-A9. At the same frequency, Cortex-A53 delivers more than 20% higher instruction throughput than the Cortex-A9 for representative workloads.

      image

      4. Supports big.LITTLE with Cortex-A57

      The Cortex-A53 is architecturally identical to the higher performance Cortex-A57 processor, and can be integrated with it in a big.LITTLE processor subsystem. big.LITTLE enables peak performance and extreme efficiency by distributing work to the right-sized processor for the task at hand.

      It is described in more detail here – Ten Things to Know About big.LITTLE

      image

      The diagram above shows Cortex-A53 combined with Cortex-A57 and a Mali-T628Graphics processor in an example system. The CCI-400 cache coherent interconnect allows the 2 CPU clusters to be combined in a seamless way that allows software to manage the task allocation in a highly transparent way, as described in <link – software>. The big.LITTLE system enables peak performance at low average power.

      Cortex-A53 in ideal for use in a standalone use scenario, delivering excellent performance at very low power and area enabling new features to be supported in the low cost smartphone segments  Our new LITTLE processor packs a performance punch.

      Read more about that in a somewhat humorous blog on Cortex-A53 from the product launch – ARM Cortex-A53 — Who You callin’ LITTLE?

      5. Extensive feature set for broad application support

      The Cortex-A53 includes a feature set that allows it to be configured and optimized through physical implementation tailored to mobile SoCs and to  scalable enterprise systems

      Mobile Features

      Enterprise Features
      • AMBA 4 ACE Coherent bus
      • big.LITTLE processing (2 CPU Clusters) with CCI-400 interconnect
      • AMBA5 CHI Coherent bus

      Scalable to 4 or more coherent CPU clustersfor low-cost servers or networking infrastructure devices.

      • 16-core systems with  CCN-504 or 32-core systems with CCN-508 – all on a single silicon die.

      Small area, low power design

      Optimized for <150mW envelope

      Small area, low power design.

      Likely still optimized for 150 mW. However, higher performance implementations can be used

      ECC, parity available, but configurable if not needed

      ECC and parity protection required for enterprise applications

      See also:

      ARM Cortex-A53 — Who You callin’ LITTLE? [Brian Jeff on ‘ARM Connected Community’, Oct 30, 2013]

      I may only weigh in at just over half a square millimeter on die, but I can handle a heavy workload and I pack quite a processing punch, and frankly I’m tired of the lack of respect I get as a “LITTLE” processor. I am the CortexTM-A53 processor from ARM, some of you may have previously known me by my code name “Apollo”. Despite being three times as efficient as my big brother, the Cortex-A57, and delivering more performance than today’s current heavyweight champ the Cortex-A9, I am often overlooked.

      Processor designers and consumers alike look to the big core, the top end MHz figure, and the number of big processors in the system when they evaluate devices like premium smartphones and tablets. What they don’t realize is that I’m the one running during most of the time the mobile applications cluster is awake, and I’m the one that will enable improvements in battery life even as delivered peak performance increases dramatically. It is high time that the LITTLE processor gets the respect and appreciation that is due.

      I’m speaking not just for myself here, but for my close cousin the Cortex-A7. We’re built from the same DNA, so to speak, sharing the same 8-stage pipeline and in-order structure. We both consume about the same level of power on our respective production process nodes, and although I bring added performance and support 64-bit, we are both quite alike. We are 100% code compatible for 32-bit code after all. And yet we don’t get the respect we deserve. It is an injustice, really.

      In high-end mobile devices, my cousin the Cortex-A7 is always telling me how everyone wants to hear about how fast the Cortex-A15 is in the system, how many Cortex-A15 CPUs are in the system, and how many MaliTM GPU cores are built into the SoC. They don’t even notice if there are four Cortex-A7 cores in the design capable of delivering plenty of performance — more performance than a lot of smartphones in the market today.  They just expect battery life to improve without giving any credit to the LITTLE processor that makes it possible.

      Well they will soon see… big.LITTLE processors are coming into the market next year, nearly sampling already, and the capability of the LITTLE processor will be in full view, let me tell you.

      Oh, and another thing — in the enterprise space, what they call “big Iron” — there is almost no recognition of the worth of small processors there. Sure, new designs are considering LITTLE processors in many-core topologies with ARM’s CoreLinkTM Cache Coherent Network (CCN) interconnect, but look at the products that are deployed today — they are mostly based on big cores, the bigger the better. Nowhere is this more evident than in the server space, where IT managers brag about how big their server racks are. Just wait and see. New server processors are being developed based on ARM, where even my big brother the Cortex-A57 is about an order of magnitude smaller and lower power than the incumbent processors. I’m in a different weight class altogether, but I can hang with the big boys on total performance. Purpose-built servers using lots of Cortex-A53 cores can deliver even more aggregate performance in a given power and thermal envelope. But are we LITTLE cores getting much attention in servers today? No. Well just watch and see. In 2015 when the first Cortex-A50 series 64-bit processors are built for lower power servers, you won’t be able to help but notice that LITTLE processors can get key jobs done in a lot less energy.

      So I may be the same size relative to my Cortex-A57 big brother as the Cortex-A7 is to the Cortex-A15, but OEMs and consumers better not underestimate me. I’ve been going through intensive work these past 2 years to build up my muscles in the places that count: my SIMD performance is way up thanks to the improved NEONTM architectural support in ARMv8 and a much wider NEON datapath. I can dual-issue almost anything. My memory system is also juiced up, as is my branch predictor capability. That’s how I can pack a bigger punch than Cortex-A9 at around a quarter the power in our respective process nodes.

      That’s all I’m saying, man. You gotta respect the LITTLE processor.

      Peace.

      AnandTech Live with ARM’s Peter Greenhalgh [anandshimpi YouTube channel, Dec 20, 2013]

      A live chat with ARM Fellow and Lead Architect on Cortex A53, Peter Greenhalgh

      From the earlier: Answered by the Experts: ARM’s Cortex A53 Lead Architect, Peter Greenhalgh [AnandTech, Dec 17, 2013]

      Cortex-A53 has been designed to be able to easily replace Cortex-A7. For example, Cortex-A7 supports the same bus-interface standards (and widths) as Cortex-A7 which allows a partner who has already built a Cortex-A7 platform to rapidly convert to Cortex-A53.

      A Cortex-A53 cluster only supports up to 4-cores. If more than 4-cores are required in a platform then multiple clusters can be implemented and coherently connected using an interconnect such as CCI-400. The reason for not scaling to 8-cores per cluster is that the L2 micro-architecture would need to either compromise energy-efficiency in the 1-4 core range to achieve performance in the 4-8 core range, or compromise performance in the 4-8 core range to maximise energy-efficiency in the 1-4 core range.

      We expect to see a range of platform configurations using Cortex-A53. A 4+4 Cortex-A53 platform configuration is fully supported and a logical progression from a 4+4 Cortex-A7 platform.

      We’re pretty happy with the 8-stage (integer) Cortex-A53 pipeline and it has served us well across the Cortex-A53, Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A5 family. So far it’s scaled nicely from 65nm to 16nm and frequencies approaching 2GHz so there’s no reason to think this won’t hold true in the future.

      Cortex-A53 has the same pipeline length as Cortex-A7 so I would expect to see similar frequencies when implemented on the same process geometry. Within the same pipeline length the design team focussed on increasing dual-issue, in-order performance as far as we possibly could. This involved symmetric dual-issue of most of the instruction set, more forwarding paths in the datapaths, reduced issue latency, larger & more associative TLB, vastly increased conditional and indirect branch prediction resources and expanded instruction and data prefetching. The result of all these changes is an increase in SPECInt-2000 performance from 0.35-SPEC/Mhz on Cortex-A7 to 0.50-SPEC/Mhz on Cortex-A53. This should provide a noticeable performance uplift on the next generation of smartphones using Cortex-A53.

      Due to the power-efficiency of Cortex-A53 on a 28nm platform, all 4 cores can comfortably be executing at 1.4GHz in less than 750mW which is easily sustainable in a current smartphone platform even while the GPU is in operation.

      The performance per watt (energy efficiency) of Cortex-A53 is very similar to Cortex-A7. Certainly within the variation you would expect with different implementations. Largely this is down to learning from Cortex-A7 which was applied to Cortex-A53 both in performance and power.

      Intel to make ARM Processors, firstly 64bit 14nm ARM Cortex-A53 ARMv8 for Altera [Charbax YouTube channel, Oct 31, 2013]

      Nathan Brookwood is an Analyst and Research Fellow at Insight 64, he is the source for the Forbes article http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2013/10/29/exclusive-intel-opens-fabs-to-arm-chips/ The new Intel CEO has changed Intel’s policy, now deciding that it’s actually OK to manufacture ARM Processors in their Fab. Possibly now Intel is also going to make ARM Processors for Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD or someone else, possibly also even for themselves, possibly releasing a whole range of Intel ARM Processors to launch if Intel cares to have some reach into Smartphones, Tablets, ARM Laptops, Smart TVs, ARM Desktops, ARM Servers, I think Intel doesn’t need to not contribute to each of those ARM categories themselves too and by fabricating for Chip Makers, it depends what the new Intel CEO finds to be the thing to do for them.

      Altera Announces Quad-Core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 for Stratix 10 SoCs [press release, Oct 29, 2013]

      Manufactured on Intel’s 14 nm Tri-Gate Process, Altera Stratix® 10 SoCs Will Deliver Industry’s Most Versatile Heterogeneous Computing Platform

      image

      Santa Clara, Calif., ARM TechCon, October 29, 2013—Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced that its Stratix 10 SoC devices, manufactured on Intel’s 14 nm Tri-Gate process, will incorporate a high-performance, quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex™-A53 processor system, complementing the device’s floating-point digital signal processing (DSP) blocks and high-performance FPGA fabric. Coupled with Altera’s advanced system-level design tools, including OpenCL, this versatile heterogeneous computing platform will offer exceptional adaptability, performance, power efficiency and design productivity for a broad range of applications, including data center computing acceleration, radar systems and communications infrastructure.

      From: Intel fabs Altera’s Stratix 10 FPGA with four ARM A53 cores [SemiAccurate, Nov 5, 2013]: Altera representatives at Techcon said that the beast would tape out in Q4/2014 or about a year from now.

      From: Pigs Fly. Altera Goes with ARM on Intel 14nm [SemiWiki.com, Oct 29, 2013]:

      I asked Altera about the schedule for all of this. Currently they have over 100 customers using the beta release of their software to model their applications in the Stratix 10. They have taped out a test-chip that is currently in the Intel fab. In the first half of next year they will have a broader release of the software to everyone. They will tape out the actual designs late in 2014 and have volume production starting in early 2015.

      Why did they pick this processor? It has the highest power efficiency of any 64-bit processor. Plus it is backwards compatible with previous Altera families which used (32-bit) ARM Cortex-A9. The A53 has a 32-bit mode that is completely binary compatible with the A9. As I reported last week from the Linley conference, ARM is on a roll into communications infrastructure, enterprise and datacenter so there is a huge overlap between the target markets for the A53 and the target markets for the Stratix 10 SoCs.

      The ARM Cortex-A53 processor, the first 64-bit processor used on a SoC FPGA, is an ideal fit for use in Stratix 10 SoCs due to its performance, power efficiency, data throughput and advanced features. The Cortex-A53 is among the most power efficient of ARM’s application-class processors, and when delivered on the 14 nm Tri-Gate process will achieve more than six times more data throughput compared to today’s highest performing SoC FPGAs. The Cortex-A53 also delivers important features, such as virtualization support, 256TB memory reach and error correction code (ECC) on L1 and L2 caches. Furthermore, the Cortex-A53 core can run in 32-bit mode, which will run Cortex-A9 operating systems and code unmodified, allowing a smooth upgrade path from Altera’s 28 nm and 20 nm SoC FPGAs.

      “ARM is pleased to see Altera adopting the lowest power 64-bit architecture as an ideal complement to DSP and FPGA processing elements to create a cutting-edge heterogeneous computing platform,” said Tom Cronk, executive vice president and general manager, Processor Division, ARM. “The Cortex-A53 processor delivers industry-leading power efficiency and outstanding performance levels, and it is supported by the ARM ecosystem and its innovative software community.”

      Leveraging Intel’s 14 nm Tri-Gate process and an enhanced high-performance architecture, Altera Stratix 10 SoCs will have a programmable-logic performance level of more than 1GHz; two times the core performance of current high-end 28 nm FPGAs.

      “High-end networking and communications infrastructure are rapidly migrating toward heterogeneous computing architectures to achieve maximum system performance and power efficiency,” said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group, a leading embedded research firm. “What Altera is doing with its Stratix 10 SoC, both in terms of silicon convergence and high-level design tool support, puts the company at the forefront of delivering heterogeneous computing platforms and positions them well to capitalize on myriad opportunities.”

      By standardizing on ARM processors across its three-generation SoC portfolio, Altera will offer software compatibility and a common ARM ecosystem of tools and operating system support. Embedded developers will be able to accelerate debug cycles with Altera’s SoC Embedded Design Suite (EDS) featuring the ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5™) Altera® Edition toolkit, the industry’s only FPGA-adaptive debug tool, as well as use Altera’s software development kit (SDK) for OpenCL to create heterogeneous implementations using the OpenCL high-level design language.

      “With Stratix 10 SoCs, designers will have a versatile and powerful heterogeneous compute platform enabling them to innovate and get to market faster,” said Danny Biran, senior vice president, corporate strategy and marketing at Altera. “This will be very exciting for customers as converged silicon continues to be the best solution for complex, high-performance applications.”

      About Altera

      Altera® programmable solutions enable designers of electronic systems to rapidly and cost effectively innovate, differentiate and win in their markets. Altera offers FPGAs, SoCs, CPLDs, ASICs and complementary technologies, such as power management, to provide high-value solutions to customers worldwide. Follow Altera viaFacebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and RSS, andsubscribe to product update emails and newsletters.  altera.com

      My Altera will use Intel Custom Foundry’s 14 nm Tri-Gate (FinFET) process services to produce its new high-end SoC FPGA with 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 IP [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Nov 1, 2013] post was already answering in detail the following questions that arised from the above announcement:

      1. Why FPGAs? Why more FPGAs?
      2. Why SoC FPGAs?
      3. Why ARM with FPGA on the Intel Tri-Gate (FinFET) process, and why now?
      4. OpenCL for FPGAs
      5. Altera SoC FPGAs

      MediaTek MT6592-based True Octa-core superphones are on the market to beat Qualcomm Snapdragon 800-based ones UPDATE: from $147+ in Q1 and $132+ in Q2

      December 22, 2013 5:56 pm / 1 Comment on MediaTek MT6592-based True Octa-core superphones are on the market to beat Qualcomm Snapdragon 800-based ones UPDATE: from $147+ in Q1 and $132+ in Q2

      … prices are starting as low as $247 in China (ZOPO Black 2, sold outside as ZP998)
      UPDATE: China market: Prices of octa-core smartphones drifting below CNY1,000 [US$165] [DIGITIMES, Jan 27, 2014]

      The battle for the entry-level smartphone segment in China is intensifying, and Coolpad with releasing an octa-core model priced below CNY1,000 (US$165), according to industry sources.

      The Coolpad Great God F1, one of two 8-core smartphones released by Coolpad recently, comes with a MediaTek 1.7GHz 8-core MT5692 processor, 5-inch display with 720p resolution and 13-megapixel camera, and a price tag of only CNY888 (US$147).

      China-based vendors including ZTE, Huawei, Lenovo, TCL and Gionee have launched 8-core smartphones with prices ranging from CNY1,699-1,999 (US$280-330).

      My own insert here: Currently the cheapest one on the market outside China is the Ulefone U9592 : http://www.fastcardtech.com/Ulefone-U9592
      image

      Ulefone U9592 –
      The cheapest MTK6592 Smart Phone so far With IPS screen & 8.0M camera

      Ulefone is the cheapest MTK6592 smart phone so far, but it has the best performance on the hardware as you can see in the review. The quality of the display is really good, even better then 720P. 5.0inch capacitive touch screen 854×480 MTK6592 Cortex A7 Octa core CPU,1.7GHz 2GB RAM +16GB ROM Dual camera:2.0MP front camera and 8.0MP back camera with flashlight Dual SIM Card Dual Standby

      This video is from another vendor,
      GeekBuying selling it for $200 (with free shipping).

      Coolpad’s aggressive pricing will force other vendors to slash their prices soon, commented the sources.

      Xiaomi Technology also plans to launch an 8-core model in the second quarter of 2014, and market sources believe that Xiaomi is likely to tag the price of its 8-core model at CNY799 (US$132).

      The keen competition in the 8-core segment could also affect pricing for the 4G LTE smartphone market, said the sources, adding that prices of mainstream LTE models will fall to around CNY1,500 (US$248) in the first half of 2014 and drop to below CNY1,000 (US$165) in the second half of the year.

      Demand for low-cost entry-level LTE smartphones from China Mobile, and fierce competition among LTE chipset suppliers including Qualcomm, Marvell Technology, MediaTek and Spreadtrum Communications will also accelerate price erosion of LTE smartphones, added the sources.

      And here is the case of a global brand: Alcatel One Touch Idol X+ 5″ 1080p with MT6592 Octa Core [Charbax YouTube channel, Jan 17, 2014], list price indication given to PCMag was: “Alcatel projected a ballpark price point of below $300.”

      Based on the newest fastest yet Mediatek MT6592 Octa core ARM Cortex-A7, with a 5″ Full HD IPS LCD display, thin and light form factor, this is the highest yet performance from MediaTek, Alcatel One Touch is a very rapidly growing Smartphone brand.

      END OF UPDATE

      Detailed MT6592 SoC information is in Eight-core MT6592 for superphones and big.LITTLE MT8135 for tablets implemented in 28nm HKMG are coming from MediaTek to further disrupt the operations of Qualcomm and Samsung [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 20-29, 2013]. See also MediaTek True Octa-core [MediaTek technology page, July 22, 2013].

      MT6592 True Octa-core : Performance Benchmark [mediateklab YouTube channel, Dec 20, 2013], its Chinese version was made available on Youku Nov 23, 2013, the  competitor’s quad-core at 2.3GHz is obviously the Snapdragon 800

      MT6592 delivers a perfect balance of performance and power consumption. See how the performance of the eight-core MT6592 (2GHz) compares to a quad-core (2.3GHz) smartphone over a period of time in benchmark test.

      MT6592 True Octa-Core: Thermal Benchmark [mediateklab YouTube channel, Dec 20, 2013]

      See how the temperature of the eight-core MT6592 compares to a leading quad-core smartphone in our high-tech ” hot chocolate” test.

      MT6592 True Octa-Core : Low Power Benchmark

      With its combination of performance-driven and energy-efficient cores, MT6592 makes much more effective use of battery power.

      MediaTek Launches MT6592 True Octa-Core Mobile Platform [MediaTek press release, Nov 20, 2013]

      The MT6592 is the world’s first heterogeneous computing SOC with scalable eight-core processing for superior multi-tasking, industry-leading multimedia and excellent performance-per-watt.
      TAIWAN, Hsinchu – 20 November, 2013 – MediaTek Incorporated (2454:TT) today unveiled the MT6592, the world’s first true octa-core mobile platform. The MediaTek MT6592 System on a Chip (SOC) combines an advanced eight-core application processor with industry-leading multimedia capabilities and mobile connectivity for a perfect balance of performance and power consumption.
      The greater computational capabilities of the MediaTek MT6592 deliver premium gaming performance, advanced multi-tasking and enhanced web browsing for high-end smartphones and tablets. The MT6592 builds on the success of existing MediaTek quad-core mobile platforms, which have revolutionized price-performance efficiency for mobile devices, and is expected to be available in devices running Android ‘Jelly Bean’ by the end of 2013. MT6592 enabled mobile devices running Android ‘Kit-Kat’ are expected in early 2014.
      Building on the advanced 28nm HPM high-performance process, the MT6592 has eight CPU cores, each capable of clock speeds up to 2GHz. The true octa-core architecture is fully scalable, and the MT6592 runs both low-power and more demanding tasks equally effectively by harnessing the full capabilities of all eight cores in any combination. An advanced MediaTek scheduling algorithm also monitors temperature and power consumption to ensure optimum performance at all times.
      The MT6592 features a world-class multimedia subsystem with a quad-core graphics engine, an advanced video playback system supporting Ultra-HD 4Kx2K H.264 video playback and support for new video codecs such as H.265 and VP9, a 16-megapixel camera and a Full HD display. The SOC also features MediaTek ClearMotion™ technology for automatic frame-rate conversion of standard 24/30fps video to high-quality 60fps video for significantly smoother playback.
      Enhancing mobile performance still further, the MT6592 incorporates the MediaTek advanced multi-mode cellular modem and a full connectivity capability for dual-band 801.11n Wi-Fi, Miracast screen-sharing as well as Bluetooth, GPS and an FM tuner.
      In addition to MediaTek’s leadership in Heterogeneous Multi-Processing (HMP) in CPU, all of its mobile SOC’s including the MT6592 have been using a Heterogeneous Computing (HC) architecture, distributing the workload to different kinds of processors and other specialized computing engines to optimize performance.  These HC building blocks include the CPU, GPU, DSP, multiple connectivity engines, multiple multimedia engines, camera engines, display engines, navigation, and sensor cores. MediaTek is committed to apply the best-in-class technologies to each of these building blocks.
      “We are thrilled to offer the new MT6592 to our customers as part of our ongoing commitment to providing inclusive mobile technology,” said Jeffrey Ju, MediaTek General Manager, Smartphone Business Unit. ”The MT6592 delivers longer battery life, low-latency response times and the best possible mobile multimedia experience. Being the first to market with this advanced eight-core SOC is testament to the industry-leading position of MediaTek.”
      ” MediaTek has taken a pioneering position with the MT6592 by being the first to use the power-efficient ARM® Cortex®-A7 processor in an octa-core configuration with the ARM Mali™ GPU,” said Noel Hurley, ARM Vice President of Strategy and Marketing, Processor Division. “We are delighted that our partnership with MediaTek continues to deliver new and innovative mobile consumer products, extending our low-power and high-performance leadership in mobile devices.”
                                                                                                     ###
      About MediaTek Inc.
      MediaTek Inc. is a leading fabless semiconductor company for wireless communications and digital multimedia solutions. The company is a market leader and pioneer in cutting-edge SOC system solutions for wireless communications, high-definition TV, optical storage, and DVD and Blu-ray products. Founded in 1997 and listed on Taiwan Stock Exchange under the “2454” code, MediaTek is headquartered in Taiwan and has sales or research subsidiaries in Mainland China, Singapore, India, United States, Japan, Korea, Denmark, England, Sweden and Dubai. For more information, visit MediaTek’s website at www.mediatek.com.

      Gameloft Modern Combat 5 True Octa Core vs Quad Core Comparison [techand trickz YouTube channel, Nov 26, 2013]

      Gameloft teams up with MediaTek to unleash stunning graphical gameplay for Modern Combat 5 [MediaTek press release, Nov 18, 2013]

      Gameloft to use latest True Octa-Core MT6592 to bring mobile gaming to the next level
      Paris – November 18, 2013 – Gameloft, a leading global publisher of digital and social games, and MediaTek, a leading fabless semiconductor company specializing in wireless communications and digital multimedia solutions, announce that the hotly anticipated Modern Combat 5 will be optimized on the new MT6592 octa-core smartphone chip, for Android smartphones.The MT6592, MediaTek’s latest innovation, is the first true octa-core processor in the world, and Gameloft’s next title, Modern Combat 5, will be the first game optimized for the new chip. As mobile gaming moves forward highly detailed and realistic gameplay, the need for higher performance chipset is required. Specific features of the new Modern Combat 5 include definition levels not seen before, especially in the technically difficult mediums of water distortion effects, reflections and shadowing.
      Modern Combat 5 is a fast-moving, visually exciting action game played across various terrains and conditions. MT6592 allows for continuous scrolling in high definition with attention to detail from soft particle display to enhanced depth of field to create a more immersive experience.
      “We’re thrilled to expand our collaboration with MediaTek,” said Ludovic Blondel, Vice President OEM at Gameloft. “This new octa-core system on a chip is focused on high performance and is one of the best mobile technologies on today’s market. We are delighted to showcase this innovative, high-end technology in Modern Combat 5, one of our most awaited games of 2014.”
      “With the rapid development of mobile Internet applications and services, mobile gaming has become one of the leading value-added services for our customers and the best medium to experience the power of True Octa-Core with our MT6592 chip,” said Jeffrey Ju, General Manager of MediaTek Smartphone Business Unit. “Our partnership with Gameloft on Modern Combat 5 is a major breakthrough for the industry and gaming community, as we empower the ultimate gaming experience that can be enjoyed anywhere, anytime.”
      Modern Combat 5 will be available on all smartphone models equipped with the MT6592 chip, and will be available for download from the Google Play Store in early 2014.
                                                                                                       ###
      About Gameloft
      A leading global publisher of digital and social games, Gameloft® has established itself as one of the top innovators in its field since 2000. Gameloft creates games for all digital platforms, including mobile phones, smartphones and tablets (including Apple® iOS and Android® devices), set-top boxes and connected TVs. Gameloft operates its own established franchises such as Asphalt®, Order & Chaos, Modern Combat, and Dungeon Hunter, and also partners with major rights holders including Universal®, Illumination Entertainment®, Disney®, Marvel®, Hasbro®, FOX®, Mattel® and Ferrari®. Gameloft is present on all continents, distributes its games in over 100 countries and employs over 5,000 developers. Gameloft is listed on NYSE Euronext Paris (NYSE Euronext: GFT.PA, Bloomberg: GFT FP, Reuters: GLFT.PA). Gameloft’s sponsored Level 1 ADR (ticker: GLOFY) is traded OTC in the US.

      Current (Dec 22, 2013) MT6592-based smartphones in PDAdb.net:

      Coolpad 9976A ???

      • Release Date: November, 2013
      • OS: Google Android 4.2.1 Chinese
      • CPU: 32bit MediaTek MT6592, 1638MHz
      • Memory: 2048MiB RAM, 7629MiB ROM
      • Display: 7″ 1200×1920 pixel
      • Cellular Phone: dual cellular operation (Dual standby)
      • Physical Attributes: 104.5 x 185 x 7.6 mm, 263 g

      O2 Super K1  [RMB 2,199 – $362]

      • Release Date: November, 2013
      • OS: Google Android 4.3
      • CPU: 32bit MediaTek MT6592, 1700MHz
      • Memory: 2048MiB RAM, 30518MiB ROM
      • Display: 5.7″ 1080×1920 pixel color IPS TFT
      • Cellular Phone: dual cellular operation (Dual standby)
      • Physical Attributes: 79.5 x 155 x 8.2 mm, 175 g

      THL W11 Monkey King II
      [RMB 1,899 – $318]

      • Release Date: November, 2013
      • OS: Google Android 4.3
      • CPU: 32bit MediaTek MT6592, 2000MHz
      • Memory: 2048MiB RAM, 30518MiB ROM
      • Display: 5″ 1080×1920 pixel color IPS TFT
      • Cellular Phone: dual cellular operation (Single standby)
      • Physical Attributes: 71.2 x 144 x 8.6 mm, 155 g

      Uniscope XC2S 
      [RMB 1,699 – $280]

      • Release Date: December, 2013
      • OS: Google Android 4.2.2 Aliyun OS
      • CPU: 32bit MediaTek MT6592, 1664MHz
      • Memory: 2048MiB RAM, 30517MiB ROM
      • Display: 5″ 1080×1920 pixel color IPS TFT
      • Cellular Phone: dual cellular operation (Single standby)
      • Physical Attributes: 68.5 x 139.5 x 8.44 mm

      THL T100s Ironman ???

      • Release Date: December, 2013
      • OS: Google Android 4.2.2
      • CPU: 32bit MediaTek MT6592, 1700MHz
      • Memory: 2048MiB RAM, 30518MiB ROM
      • Display: 5″ 1080×1920 pixel color IPS TFT
      • Cellular Phone: dual cellular operation (Dual standby)
      • Physical Attributes: 70.4 x 144.2 x 8.8 mm, 144 g

      UMI X2S  ???

      • Release Date: December, 2013
      • OS: Google Android 4.2.2
      • CPU: 32bit MediaTek MT6592, 1664MHz
      • Memory: 2048MiB RAM, 30518MiB ROM
      • Display: 5″ 1080×1920 pixel
      • Cellular Phone: dual cellular operation (Dual standby)

      Newman K18 16GB ???

      • Release Date: December, 2013
      • OS: Google Android 4.2.2
      • CPU: 32bit MediaTek MT6592, 1700MHz
      • Memory: 2048MiB RAM, 15259MiB ROM
      • Display: 5″ 1080×1920 pixel color IPS TFT
      • Cellular Phone: dual cellular operation (Dual standby)
      • Physical Attributes: 69.9 x 144 x 6.1 mm, 120 g

      Newman K18 32GB  ???

      • Release Date: December, 2013
      • OS: Google Android 4.2.2
      • CPU: 32bit MediaTek MT6592, 1664MHz
      • Memory: 2048MiB RAM, 30518MiB ROM
      • Display: 5″ 1080×1920 pixel color IPS TFT
      • Cellular Phone: dual cellular operation (Dual standby)
      • Physical Attributes: 69.9 x 144 x 6.1 mm, 120 g

      GiONEE Elife E7 mini 16GB ???

      • Release Date: December, 2013
      • OS: Google Android 4.3
      • CPU: 32bit MediaTek MT6592, 1700MHz
      • Memory: 1024MiB RAM, 15259MiB ROM
      • Display: 4.7″ 720×1280 pixel color IPS TFT
      • Cellular Phone: dual cellular operation (Dual standby)
      • Physical Attributes: 66 x 139.8 x 8.6 mm

      Zopo ZP998  [internally as Zopo Black 2 for RMB 1,499 – $247]

      • Release Date: January, 2014
      • OS: Google Android 4.2.2
      • CPU: 32bit MediaTek MT6592, 1664MHz
      • Memory: 2048MiB RAM, 30518MiB ROM
      • Display: 5.5″ 1080×1920 pixel color IPS TFT
      • Cellular Phone: dual cellular operation (Dual standby)

      Alcatel One Touch Idol X+ (TCL S960T)  [RMB 1,999 – $329]

      • Release Date: January, 2014
      • OS: Google Android 4.2.2
      • CPU: 32bit MediaTek MT6592, 2000MHz
      • Memory: 2048MiB RAM, MiB ROM
      • Display: 5″ 1080×1920 pixel color IPS TFT
      • Cellular Phone: GSM850, GSM900, GSM1800,..
      • Physical Attributes: 69.1 x 140.4 x 7.9 mm, 125 g

      Huawei Ascend G750-T00 / Honor 3X / Glory 4 
      [RMB 1,698 – $280]

      • Release Date: January, 2014
      • OS: Google Android 4.2.2 Chinese
      • CPU: 32bit MediaTek MT6592, 1664MHz
      • Memory: 2048MiB RAM, 7630MiB ROM
      • Display: 5.5″ 720×1280 pixel color IPS TFT
      • Cellular Phone: dual cellular operation (Dual standby)

      The case of the most ambitious newcomer, ZOPO:

      Next Step of ZOPO-Return Banquet of Partners of ZOPO Draws to a Successful Conclusion [ZOPOMOBILE YouTube channel, Aug 31, 2013]

      Speech from Kevin Xu, CEO of ZOPO at 2013 ZOPO-Return Banquet of Partners of ZOPO Draws to a Successful Conclusion Edited by official authorized zopomobileshop.com http://www.zopomobileshop.com
      From: At August 30, 2013, Return Banquet of Partners（global Market） of Shenzhen ZOPO Communications-equipment Co., Ltd. was held at the The Pavilion Hotel, Shenzhen, China. More than 50 people attended this return banquet activity, including Mr. Kevin Xu, President of ZOPO Communications-equipment Co., Ltd., Mr. Allen Cao, senior manager, Mr Shawn Sun, executive director of zopomobileshop.com, and representatives of various reseller, such as dx.com, efox-shop.com, lightinthebox.com and other retail business.
      The return banquet at afternoon started with Mr. Allen Cao, senior manager of international market, delivered his thanksgiving remarks to the guests on behalf of the ZOPO Communications-equipment Co., Ltd, thanking the partners of the various fields for their constant trust and support to ZOPO Communications-equipment Co., Ltd. He introduced to partners achievements of the accelerated development the ZOPO mobile phone business on global market in 2012 and 2013. ZOPO already have 4 official distributors in European: French, Germany, Italy, Spain. ZOPO also have built up strategic partnership with more then 10 E- business, such as zopomobileshop.com, pandawill.com, ebay, paypal, AliExpress and so on. Mr.Cao show special thanks to zopomobileshop.com team, appreciate Ms. Jessica Tang and Zopomobileshop team provide global customers a channel to understand ZOPO and the reliable service. Afterwards，Mr. Kevin Xu，President of the company introduced its direction for future development in becoming “ a reliable and professional smart phone supplier by providing users phone with the latest tech”. He confirms that ZOPO will be the first factory to release smart phone with 8 cores. Further more, the ZP980 and C2, will have a update to a 2rd generation version and a version with batter price come out soon. Then Mr. Jay Wang, CEO of Pandawill.com has a speech as partners representative.
      Return banquet of partners of ZOPO communications-equipment CO.，Ltd. has been end of a dinner. Mr. Kevin Xu, President of ZOPO Communications-equipment Co., Ltd., Mr. Allen Cao, senior manager, drank with all guests, praying together for a bright and beautiful future. The party thus drew to its successful conclusion and happy wishes.

      Zopo – Factory Testing of Zopo C2 Mobile Phone [Digital Playworld YouTube channel, July 31, 2013]

      http://www.digitalplayworld.co.uk A short video showing some of the quality testing that the Zopo factory put their mobile phones through. To order yours in the UK visit http://www.digitalplayworld.co.uk

      Zopo Factory Tour — How Popular Zopo 990, 980 Phones Be Made [Jody Elife YouTube channel, Nov 19, 2013]

      Recently, Antelife team are so honored to get invitation from Zopo company, to visit Zopo factory, reveal each detail you wanna know, and show you how Zopo phones be made. More Zopo phones here: http://www.antelife.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=zopo

      ZOPO ZP998 AnTuTu Benchmark [ZOPOMOBILE YouTube channel, Dec 17, 2013]

      ZOPO zp998 Octa Core NFC Test – Zopomobileshop [ZOPOMOBILE YouTube channel, Dec 17, 2013]

      From: http://www.zoposhop.com/officialZOPO-ZP998-XiaoHei-II-MTK6592-Octa-Core-1-7GHz-5-5-inch-FHD-Screen-14-0M-Camera-Smart-Phone-With-OTG-NFC-5G-WIFI-Air

      Pre-order ZOPO ZP998 FIRST TRUE 1.7GHz Eight-core 2GRAM+32 ROM MTK6592T 14.0MP CAMERA (Delivery after 30days)

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      The future is here: Yes, it is Microsoft Surface 2 with modern apps only! (And ARM, not x86/x64!)

      November 17, 2013 3:59 pm / Leave a comment

      This video is speaking for itself (and for the title): Why I Love my Microsoft Surface 2 : Tips and Tricks [Sean Ong YouTube channel, Nov 3, 2013]

      In this video I show off my favorite features in the Microsoft Surface 2, with windows 8.1 RT. I show off voice control (windows speech recognition), multiple monitor support, and a variety of accessories via USB hub (including external hard drive, mouse, keyboard, and Xbox 360 controller integration). I show how I connect the Surface 2 to my HDTV as well as wireless casting of music and video! I also go through some other features, such as Spotify web player, and icloud web. Also kid friendly applications and multiple accounts. There’s so much stuff this thing can do, it will blow your mind away

      That is how Sean Ong, a senior consultant at Navigant (focussing there on “technical, economic, and policy analysis of energy efficiency and renewable energy systems”) and himself an energy analysis engineer, was able to present the above, truly incredible customer value from current and especially future point of view for Windows 8.1 in geneneral and Surface 2 (ARM based) in particular. It is even more remarkable as nobody, I REPEAT NOBODY, from Microsoft worldwide could do that. I know even a highly professional, true world class Windows 8/Windows 8.1 expert who was not only fascinated himself by the above video, but acknowledged honestly that he was unaware of the speech recognition progress in Windows 8.1. And we are talking about an internal expert who has already been involved in the internal expert network of similar, most devoted Microsoft specialists in Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 for years.

      For me this video is incredibly important because:

      NOT ONLY FOR THE FUTURE OF MICROSOFT BUT FOR THE WHOLE STATE OF COMPUTING
      AS THE MISSING COMMUNICATIONS FROM MICROSOFT, EVEN THE TOTAL INABILITY OF MICROSOFT TO COMMUNICATE THE INHERENT WINDOWS 8.1/SURFACE 2 VALUES, WERE CLEARLY POINTING TO TOTAL LACK OF MARKETING COMPETENCY FOR ITS GAME-CHANGING, MICROSOFT-ONLY, POST PC AREA INNOVATIONS INHERENT IN WINDOWS 8.1/SURFACE 2

      Although these signs (both the positive and negative ones) were coupled with a number of competitive positive changes for Microsoft, such as:

      But a number of competitive negative changes for Microsoft became even more worrisome (than any time before) lately, such as:

      Fortunately we already know:

      Board of directors initiates succession process; Ballmer remains CEO until successor is named.
      Microsoft Corp. today announced that Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer has decided to retire as CEO within the next 12 months, upon the completion of a process to choose his successor. In the meantime, Ballmer will continue as CEO and will lead Microsoft through the next steps of its transformation to a devices and services company that empowers people for the activities they value most.
      “There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time,” Ballmer said. “We have embarked on a new strategy with a new organization and we have an amazing Senior Leadership Team. My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction.”
      The Board of Directors has appointed a special committee to direct the process. This committee is chaired by John Thompson, the board’s lead independent director, and includes Chairman of the Board Bill Gates, Chairman of the Audit Committee Chuck Noski and Chairman of the Compensation Committee Steve Luczo. The special committee is working with Heidrick & Struggles International Inc., a leading executive recruiting firm, and will consider both external and internal candidates.
      “The board is committed to the effective transformation of Microsoft to a successful devices and services company,” Thompson said. “As this work continues, we are focused on selecting a new CEO to work with the company’s senior leadership team to chart the company’s course and execute on it in a highly competitive industry.”
      “As a member of the succession planning committee, I’ll work closely with the other members of the board to identify a great new CEO,” said Gates. “We’re fortunate to have Steve in his role until the new CEO assumes these duties.”
      Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
      Outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has always been a speaker and performer like no other — his absolute enthusiasm for his company is electric in person, turning ordinary corporate events into raw displays of emotion that are often criticized but never forgotten. Read more at The Verge: http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/27/4779036/exclusive-video-steve-ballmers-intense-tearful-goodbye-to-microsoft
      Steve Ballmer paced his corner office on a foggy January morning here, listening through loudspeakers to his directors’ voices on a call that would set in motion the end of his 13-year reign as Microsoft Corp.’s MSFT -0.47% chief executive.
      Microsoft lagged behind Apple Inc. AAPL -0.60% and Google Inc. GOOG -0.16% in important consumer markets, despite its formidable software revenue. Mr. Ballmer tried to spell out his plan to remake Microsoft, but a director cut him off, telling him he was moving too slowly.
      “Hey, dude, let’s get on with it,” lead director John Thompson says he told him. “We’re in suspended animation.” Mr. Ballmer says he replied that he could move faster.
      But the contentious call put him on a difficult journey toward his August decision to retire, sending Microsoft into further tumult as it began seeking a successor to a man who has been at its heart for 33 years.
      “Maybe I’m an emblem of an old era, and I have to move on,” the 57-year-old Mr. Ballmer says, pausing as his eyes well up. “As much as I love everything about what I’m doing,” he says, “the best way for Microsoft to enter a new era is a new leader who will accelerate change.”
      Mr. Ballmer, in a series of exclusive interviews tinged with his characteristic bluster and wistfulness, tells of how he came to believe that he couldn’t lead Microsoft forward—that, in fact, Microsoft would not be led by him because of the very corporate culture he had helped instill.
      Mr. Ballmer and his board have been in agreement: Microsoft, while maintaining its strong software business, must shake up its management structure and refocus on mobile devices and online services if it is to find future profit growth and reduce its dependence on the fading PC market.
      The board’s beef was speed. The directors “didn’t push Steve to step down,” says Mr. Thompson, a longtime technology executive who heads the board’s CEO-search committee, “but we were pushing him damn hard to go faster.”
      Investors, too, were pushing for transformation. “At this critical juncture, Wall Street wants new blood to bring fundamental change,” says Brent Thill, a longtime Microsoft analyst at UBS AG. “Steve was a phenomenal leader who racked up profits and market share in the commercial business, but the new CEO must innovate in areas Steve missed—phone, tablet, Internet services, even wearables.”
      The Microsoft board’s list of possible successors includes, among others, former Nokia Corp. NOK1V.HE +0.25% CEO Stephen Elop, Microsoft enterprise-software chief Satya Nadella and Ford Motor Co. F -0.12% CEO Alan Mulally, say people familiar with the search. In conjunction with Microsoft’s annual shareholder meeting Nov. 19, the board plans to meet and will discuss succession, says a person familiar with the schedule.
      Representatives for Mr. Elop and Mr. Nadella say the men have no comment on the search. A Ford spokesman says “nothing has changed” since November 2012, when Ford said Mr. Mulally would remain CEO through at least 2014, adding: “Alan remains absolutely focused on continuing to make progress on our One Ford plan. We do not engage in speculation.”
      Microsoft’s next chief will be only the third in its history. Mr. Ballmer joined in 1980 at the suggestion of his Harvard University pal, co-founder Bill Gates, and is its second-largest individual shareholder and a billionaire.
      After growing up in Detroit, where his father was a Ford manager, Mr. Ballmer roomed down the hall from Mr. Gates at Harvard. He dropped his Stanford M.B.A. studies to become Microsoft’s first business manager.
      He was Mr. Gates’s right-hand man, helping turn Microsoft into a force that redefined how the world used computers. He took the reins in 2000, further solidifying Microsoft’s position in software markets and keeping the profit engine humming. Revenue tripled during his tenure to almost $78 billion in the year ended this June, and profit grew 132% to nearly $22 billion.
      But while profit rolled in from Microsoft’s traditional markets, it missed epic changes, including Web-search advertising and the consumer shift to mobile devices and social media.
      Last year, Mr. Ballmer sought to reboot. In an October shareholder letter, he declared Microsoft would become a provider of “devices and services” for businesses and individuals.
      He told the board he wanted to lead the charge and remain until his youngest son graduated from high school in four years. He began his own succession planning by meeting potential candidates in what he calls “cloak-and-dagger” meetings.
      Mr. Ballmer’s reboot plan required a corporate overhaul. For guidance, he called his longtime friend, Ford’s Mr. Mulally, once a top Boeing Co. BA +0.73% executive. They met Christmas Eve at a Starbucks on Mercer Island near Seattle.
      Mr. Ballmer brought a messenger bag, pulling out onto a table an array of phones and tablets from Microsoft and competitors. He asked Mr. Mulally how he turned around Ford. For four hours, he says, Mr. Mulally detailed how teamwork and simplifying the Ford brand helped him reposition it.
      The Ford spokesman says: “Ford and Microsoft have a long-standing business partnership, and many of our leaders discuss business together frequently.”
      It was a wake-up call for Mr. Ballmer, who had run the software giant with bravado and concedes that “I’m big, I’m bald and I’m loud.”
      Microsoft’s culture included corporate silos where colleagues were often pitted against one another—a competitive milieu that spurred innovation during Microsoft’s heyday but now sometimes leaves groups focused on their own legacies and bottom lines rather than on the big technology picture and Microsoft as a whole.
      He recalls thinking: “I’ll remake my whole playbook. I’ll remake my whole brand.”
      The board liked his new plan. But as Mr. Ballmer prepared to implement it, his directors on the January conference call demanded he expedite it.
      Pushing hardest, say participants, were Mr. Thompson, who had held top jobs at International Business Machines Corp. IBM +0.54% and Symantec Corp. SYMC +0.38%, and Stephen Luczo, CEO of Seagate Technology STX -2.33% PLC. Mr. Luczo declines to comment.
      “But, I didn’t want to shift gears until I shipped Windows,” Mr. Ballmer says he told the directors on the call, explaining that he hadn’t moved faster in late 2012 because he was focused on releasing in October the next generation of Windows, Microsoft’s longtime cash cow.
      Mr. Ballmer swung into gear, drafting a management-reorganization plan to discuss during a March retreat at a Washington mountain resort. He invited Mr. Thompson and another director, to get board perspective on his plan.
      Instead, he got more pressure. Mr. Thompson says he told Mr. Ballmer and his executives: “Either get on the bus or get off.”
      Mr. Ballmer says he took that as an endorsement of his plan. That evening, some of them played poker, drank Scotch and gathered around the lodge’s fireplace.
      The next month, hedge fund ValueAct Capital disclosed a $2 billion Microsoft stake. ValueAct’s CEO Jeffrey Ubben at a conference said Microsoft’s stock was undervalued. Other shareholders were urging it to increase its dividend and shed noncore businesses. A ValueAct spokesman declines further comment. In September, Microsoft increased its dividend but hasn’t sold off businesses investors have urged it to, such as the Bing search engine.
      Mr. Ballmer hewed to Mr. Mulally’s recommendations. For years, he had consulted with Microsoft’s unit chiefs individually, often dispensing marching orders. Now, he began inviting them to sit together in a circle in his office to foster camaraderie.
      It was a lurching corporate-culture change. “It’s not the way we operated at all in Steve’s 30-plus years of leadership of the company,” says Mr. Nadella, an executive vice president.
      Mr. Ballmer says his senior team struggled with the New Steve. Some resisted on matters large—combining engineering teams—and small, such as weekly status reports.
      Qi Lu, an executive vice president, submitted a 56-page report on applications and services. Mr. Ballmer sent it back, insisting on just three pages—part of a new mandate to encourage the simplicity needed for collaboration. Mr. Lu says he retorted: “But you always want the data and detail!”
      Mr. Ballmer says he started to realize he had trained managers to see the trees, not the forest, and that many weren’t going to take his new mandates to heart.
      In May, he began wondering whether he could meet the pace the board demanded. “No matter how fast I want to change, there will be some hesitation from all constituents—employees, directors, investors, partners, vendors, customers, you name it—to believe I’m serious about it, maybe even myself,” he says.
      His personal turning point came on a London street. Winding down from a run one morning during a May trip, he had a few minutes to stroll, some rare spare time for recent months. For the first time, he began thinking Microsoft might change faster without him.
      “At the end of the day, we need to break a pattern,” he says. “Face it: I’m a pattern.”
      Mr. Ballmer says he secretly began drafting retirement letters—ultimately some 40 of them, ranging from maudlin to radical.
      On a plane from Europe in late May, he told Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith that it “might be the time for me to go.” The next day, Mr. Ballmer called Mr. Thompson, with the same message.
      Mr. Thompson called two other directors, Mr. Luczo and Charles Noski, former Bank of America Corp. BAC +0.84% vice chairman, and says he told them: “If Steve’s ready to go, let’s see if we can get on with this.”
      At the board’s June meeting in Bellevue, Wash., Mr. Ballmer says he told the directors: “While I would like to stay here a few more years, it doesn’t make sense for me to start the transformation and for someone else to come in during the middle.”
      The board wasn’t “surprised or shocked,” says Mr. Noski, given directors’ conversations with Mr. Ballmer. Mr. Thompson says he and others indicated that “fresh eyes and ears might accelerate what we’re trying to do here.”
      Mr. Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, told Mr. Ballmer that he understood from experience how hard it was to leave when Microsoft was your “life,” says someone familiar with Mr. Gates’s thinking. Mr. Gates told the board he supported Mr. Ballmer’s departure if it ensured Microsoft “remains successful,” this person says.
      That night, after Mr. Ballmer watched his son sing at his high-school baccalaureate ceremony—a Coldplay song with the lyrics: “It’s such a shame for us to part; nobody said it was easy; no one ever said it would be this hard”—he says he told his wife and three sons he was probably leaving Microsoft. They all cried.
      On Aug. 21, the board held a conference call to accept Mr. Ballmer’s retirement. Mr. Gates and Mr. Thompson sat with Mr. Ballmer in his office. It was over in less than an hour.
      Mr. Ballmer vows not to be a lame duck.
      “Charge! Charge! Charge!” he bellows, jumping up from an interview and lunging forward while pumping his fist forward like a battering ram. “I’m not going to wimp away from anything!”
      He has remained active, shepherding a $7.5 billion deal to buy Nokia’s mobile businesses and fine-tuning holiday-marketing strategies for Microsoft’s Surface tablets and new Xbox game console. In October, Microsoft reported better-than-expected quarterly earnings.
      At his final annual employee meeting this September, Mr. Ballmer gave high-fives and ran off the stage to the song: “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” from the movie “Dirty Dancing.”
      Last month, walking along Lake Washington, Mr. Ballmer bumped into Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, who was fired from earlier jobs and now is thriving. Mr. Carroll says he told his neighbor he went through “something like this” and predicted it is “going to be great.”
      Mr. Ballmer says he is weighing casual offers as varied as university teaching and coaching his youngest son’s high-school basketball team. He plans no big decisions for at least six months—except that he won’t run another big company. He says he’s open to remaining a Microsoft director.
      At a recent executive meeting, he perched on a stool to review developments. His third slide was labeled “New CEO.”
      “Not a soul in this room doesn’t think we need to go through this transition,” he said. As he stood up, his voice started to crack: “As much as I wish I could stay your CEO, I still own a big chunk of Microsoft, and I’m going to keep it.”
      He walked back toward the stool, then turned around and said in a near-whisper: “Please take good care of Microsoft.”

      You could read also Reporter’s Notebook: Two Days With Steve Ballmer [The Wall Street Journal, Nov 15, 2013] ending this way: 

      … This summer when he was deciding whether to step down, Mr. Ballmer quietly met with big institutional investors in Boston and San Francisco. The head of one big institution told him, “Microsoft would be better served with you gone.” Mr. Ballmer, who’s the second largest individual shareholder, knew the investor might get his wish. Yet, he argued, “Who cares more about Microsoft than I do? I own a lot. It’s my life.”

      And that showed how his emotions alternate between bluster and wistfulness. The deed is done, the decision has been made, a new CEO is imminent. But Mr. Ballmer is struggling because Microsoft has been so much more than a job … as he said, “my life.”

      My closing remarks:

      1. The next CEO problem to be solved is definitely the #1 issue for the future of the Microsoft
      2. The #2 issue is how successfully the Unique Nokia assets (from factories to global device distribution & sales, and the Asha sub $100 smartphone platform etc.) will now empower the One Microsoft devices and services strategy [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Sept 3, 2013] for which the Microsoft answers to the questions about Nokia devices and services acquisition: tablets, Windows downscaling, reorg effects, Windows Phone OEMs, cost rationalization, ‘One Microsoft’ empowerment, and supporting developers for an aggressive growth in market share [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Sept 4, 2013] is providing an interim answer, i.e. till the arrival of the new CEO
      3. The #3 isssue is How the device play will unfold in the new Microsoft organization? [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 14, 2013]. If Stephen Elop, former CEO of Nokia, and a previous senior executive of Microsoft, will become the next CEO then Minutes of a high-octane but also expert evangelist CEO: Stephen Elop, Nokia [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 13, 2013] could provide some clue for changes to be expected as a strategic evolution of the current one described in the already mentioned [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 14, 2013]. Even in case when he will not be selected by the Microsoft board as the next CEO he will have very strong influence on the device play for the initial first year integration of the acquired Nokia businesses into Microsoft, for very simple reason, that nobody could do this, and a successfull integration is a higher priority, #2 issue.
      4. Strategically, however, the most important issue is the

        5. Microsoft reorg for delivering/supporting high-value experiences/activities [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 11, 2013]

      5. Everything else which might be a crucial issue during this process is highly controversial, without any official clues from Microsoft or any other stakeholder sources. The most controversial among all of them is the issue of non-profitable and/or not necessarily integral to Microsoft businesses. These are the Bing and the Xbox businesses. The range of external opinions is extremely large with investment circles firmly believing that neither Bing nor Xbox are inherently integral to Microsoft, and most of the external development community with an exacly opposite belief of those businesses being inherently internal.

      6. My personal opinion is that with spin-off both extremes could be served sufficiently well, and even open completely new business development opportunities for both Bing and Xbox to grow substantially faster and bigger than otherwise. I would be especially enthusiastic for an Xbox spin-off as that business is already (with upcoming Oct 22 introduction of Xbox One) not a gaming console, but an entertainment ecosystem type of business. As such it would get enormous growth opportunities with its spin-off from the tightly integrated Microsoft mother ship.

      7. The ultimate issue for me, however, is how the currently quite crippled and/or bureaucratic marketing machinery of Microsoft could be completely overhauled as part of Nokia integration, and how fast that could be achieved, if any? I mean a new marketing machinery which is thriving on the huge number of opportunities provided by already delivered game-changing products and technologies, instead of not understanding them at all. I mean not simply an ability to produce videos like the one in the beginning of this post, but a competency to produce whole storyboards for production of such videos and other communication materials. One might call it “high-octane marketing” for simplicity. Even more I envisage such integration of the marketing activities into the whole supply chain management (SCM) as is done in Samsung. See my Samsung has unbeatable supply chain management, it is incredibly good in everything which is consumer hardware, but vulnerability remains in software and M&A [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Nov 11, 2013] post for that, from which I will copy the following illustration here as well:

      Xamarin: C# developers of native “business” and “mobile workforce” applications now can easily work cross-platform, for Android and iOS clients as well

      November 15, 2013 2:25 pm / 1 Comment on Xamarin: C# developers of native “business” and “mobile workforce” applications now can easily work cross-platform, for Android and iOS clients as well

      … while other cross-platform applications, i.e. “applications for consumers only” are prohibited for C# developers by the still high price of Xamarin, which essentially applies to indie and start-up developers only

      The mobile application development technology behind this, from the cloud to the clients, was extensively covered in Windows Phone 8: getting much closer to a unified development platform with Windows 8 [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Nov 8, 2012] post of mine (including the cross-platform possibilities with Xamarin already), and then continued in Windows Azure becoming an unbeatable offering on the cloud computing market [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, June 28, 2013] and Microsoft partners empowered with ‘cloud first’, high-value and next-gen experiences for big data, enterprise social, and mobility on wide variety of Windows devices and Windows Server + Windows Azure + Visual Studio as the platform [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 10, 2013] posts for the cloud part.

      Note: Decide for yourself how that “consumers only applications by indie and start-up developers” type of exclusion will effect the cross platform development needs, after you take a look at the current state of the evolution of smartphone and tablet markets:

       

      Q3’13 smartphone and overall mobile phone markets: Android smartphones surpassed 80% of the market, with Samsung increasing its share to 32.1% against Apple’s 12.1% only; while Nokia achieved a strong niche market position both in “proper” (Lumia) and “de facto” (Asha Touch) smartphones 
      [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Nov 14, 2013]

      The tablet market in Q1-Q3’13: It was mainly shaped by white-box vendors while Samsung was quite successfully attacking both Apple and the white-box vendors with triple digit growth both worldwide and in Mainland China 
      [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Nov 14, 2013]

      Details

      For one of the problems solved now by Microsoft see my Obstacles for .NET on other platforms [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Oct 15, 2013] post.

      To understand what is the situation now I will start with:

      In: Cross Platform .NET Just A Lot Got Better [Haacked blog, Nov 13, 2013]

      Not long ago I wrote a blog post about how platform restrictions harm .NET. This led to a lot of discussion online and on Twitter. At some point David Kean suggested a more productive approach would be to create a UserVoice issue. So I did and it quickly gathered a lot of votes.

      …

      Phil Haack – Customer Feedback for Microsoft http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/users/40986152-phil-haack:

      Remove the platform restriction on Microsoft NuGet packages 4,929 votes
      Phil Haack shared this idea and gave it 3 votes  ·  Sep 26, 2013

      COMPLETED  ·  Visual Studio team (Product Team, Microsoft) responded
      Thanks a lot for this suggestion and all the votes.
      We’re happy to announce that we’ve removed the Windows-only restriction from our license. We’ve applied this new license to most of our packages and will continue to use this license moving forward.
      Here is our announcement:
      http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2013/11/13/pcl-and-net-nuget-libraries-are-now-enabled-for-xamarin.aspx
      For reference, the license for stable packages can be found here:
      http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=329770
      Thanks,
      Immo Landwerth
      Program Manager, .NET Framework Team
      Phil Haack commented  ·  Nov 13, 2013
      Amazing! Thanks! This is great!

      Bravo!

      Serious Kudos to the .NET team for this. It looks like most of the interesting PCL packages are now licensed without platform restrictions. As an example of how this small change sends out ripples of goodness, we can now make Octokit.net depend on portable HttpClient and make Octokit.net itself more cross platform and portable without a huge amount of work.

      I’m also excited about the partnership between Microsoft and Xamarin this represents. I do believe C# is a great language for cross-platform development and it’s good to see Microsoft jumping back on board with this. This is a marked change from the situation I wrote about in 2012.

      • then will go to S. Somasegar, Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division at Microsoft:

      In: Visual Studio 2013 Launch: Announcing Visual Studio Online [Somasegar’s blog, Nov 13, 2013]

      … Microsoft and Xamarin are collaborating to help .NET developers broaden the reach of their applications to additional devices, including iOS and Android …

      …

      Partner News

      With today’s launch of Visual Studio 2013, we have 123 products from 74 partners available already as Visual Studio 2013 extensions.  As part of an ecosystem of developer tools experiences, Visual Studio continues to be a platform for delivering a great breadth of developer experiences.

      Xamarin

      The devices and services transformation is driving developers to think about how they will build applications that reach the greatest breadth of devices and end-user experiences.  We’ve offered great HTML-based cross platform development experiences in Visual Studio with ASP.NET and JavaScript.  But our .NET developers have also asked us how they can broaden the reach of their applications and skills. 

      Today, I am excited to announce a broad collaboration between Microsoft and Xamarin.  Xamarin’s solution enables developers to leverage Visual Studio, Windows Azure and .NET to further extend the reach of their business applications across multiple devices, including iOS and Android.

      The collaboration between Xamarin and Microsoft brings several benefits for developers today.  First, as an initial step in a technical partnership, Xamarin’s next release that is being announced today will support Portable Class Libraries, enabling developers to share libraries and components across a breadth of Microsoft and non-Microsoft platforms.  Second, Professional, Premium and Ultimate MSDN subscribers will have access to exclusive benefits for getting started with Xamarin, including new training resources, extended evaluation access to Xamarin’s Visual Studio integration and special pricing on Xamarin products.

      …

      Xamarin, the company that empowers developers to build fully native apps for iOS, Android, Windows and Mac from a single shared code base, today announced a global collaboration with Microsoft that makes it easy for mobile developers to build native mobile apps for all major platforms in Visual Studio. Xamarin is the only solution that unifies native iOS, Android and Windows app development in Visual Studio—bridging one of the largest developer bases in the world to the most successful mobile device platforms.

      A highly competitive app marketplace and the consumerization of IT have put tremendous pressure on developers to deliver high quality mobile user experiences for both consumers and employees. A small bug or crash can lead to permanent app abandonment or poor reviews. Device fragmentation, with hundreds of devices on the market for iOS and Android alone, multiplies testing efforts resulting in a time-consuming and costly development process. This is further complicated by faster release cycles for mobile, necessitating more stringent and efficient regression testing.

      The collaboration spans three areas:

      • A technical collaboration to better integrate Xamarin technology with Microsoft developer tools and services.
        Aligned with this goal, Xamarin is a SimShip partner for Visual Studio 2013, releasing same-day support for Microsoft’s latest Visual Studio release that launched today. In addition, Xamarin has released today full integration for Microsoft’s Portable Library projects in iOS and Android apps, making it easier than ever for developers to share code across devices.
      • Xamarin’s recently launched Xamarin University is now free to MSDN subscribers. The training course helps developers become successful with native iOS and Android development over the course of 30 days. Classes for the $1,995 program kick off in January 2014, with a limited number of seats available at no cost for MSDN subscribers.
      • MSDN subscribers have exclusive trial and pricing options to Xamarin subscriptions for individuals and teams.

        Get a 90-day trial to Xamarin, sign up for Xamarin University for free (normally $1,995), and save 30-50% on Xamarin with special MSDN pricing.
        All the productivity you love in Visual Studio and C#,
        on iOS and Android.

      The broad collaboration between Microsoft and Xamarin which we announced today is targeted at supporting developers interested in extending their applications across multiple devices, said S. Somasegar, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Corporation. With Xamarin, developers combine all of the productivity benefits of C#, Visual Studio 2013 and Windows Azure with the flexibility to quickly build for multiple device targets.

      According to Gartner, by 2016, 70 percent of the mobile workforce will have a smartphone, half of which will be purchased by the employee, and 90 percent of enterprises will have two or more platforms to support. Faced with high expectations for mobile user experiences and the pressures of BYOD, companies and developers alike are looking for scalable ways to migrate business practices and customer interactions to high-performance, native apps on multiple platforms.

      To meet this need to support heterogeneous mobile environments, Microsoft and Xamarin are making it easy for developers to mobilize their existing skills and code. By standardizing mobile app development with Xamarin and C#, developers are able to share on average 75 percent of their source code across device platforms, while still delivering fully native apps. Xamarin supports 100 percent of both iOS and Android APIs—anything that can be done in Objective-C or Java can be done in C# with Xamarin.

      In just two years, Xamarin has amassed a community of over 440,000 developers in 70 countries, more than 20,000 paying accounts and a network of over 120 consulting partners globally.

      We live in a multi-platform world, and by embracing Xamarin, Microsoft is enabling its developer community to thrive as mobile developers, said Nat Friedman, CEO and cofounder, Xamarin. Our collaboration with Microsoft will accelerate enterprise mobility for millions of developers.

      The groundbreaking partnership was announced as part of the Visual Studio Live 2013 launch event in New York City. In addition, Xamarin and Microsoft have teamed up with the popular podcast, .NET Rocks!, for a 20-city nationwide road show featuring live demos on how to use Visual Studio 2013, Xamarin and Windows Azure to build and scale mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows. For a full list of cities and to sign up for an event, please visit: xamarin.com/modern-apps-roadshow

      About Xamarin
      Xamarin is the new standard for enterprise mobile development. No other platform enables businesses to reach all major devices—iOS, Android, Mac and Windows—with 100 percent fully native apps from a single code base. With Xamarin, businesses standardize mobile app development in C#, share on average 75 percent source code across platforms, and leverage their existing skills, teams, tools and code to rapidly deliver great apps with broad reach. Xamarin is used by over 430,000 developers from more than 100 Fortune 500 companies and over 20,000 paying customers including Clear Channel, Bosch, McKesson, Halliburton, Cognizant, GitHub, Rdio and WebMD, to accelerate the creation of mission-critical consumer and enterprise apps. For more information, please visit: xamarin.com, read our blog, and follow us on Twitter @xamarinhq.

      Earlier today, Soma announced a collaboration between Microsoft and Xamarin. As you probably know, Xamarin’s Visual Studio extension enables developers to use VS and .NET to extend the reach of their apps across multiple devices, including iOS and Android. As part of that collaboration, today, we are announcing two releases around the .NET portable class libraries (PCLs) that support this collaboration:

      Microsoft .NET NuGet Libraries Released

      Today we released the following portable libraries with our new license, on NuGet.org:

      You can now start using these libraries with Xamarin tools, either directly or as the dependencies of portable libraries that you reference.

      We also took the opportunity to apply the same license to Microsoft .NET NuGet libraries, which aren’t fully portable today, like Entity Framework and all of the Microsoft AspNet packages. These libraries target the full .NET Framework, so they’re not intended to be used with Xamarin’s iOS and Android tools (just like they don’t target Windows Phone or Windows Store).

      These releases will enable significantly more use of these common libraries across Windows and non-Windows platforms, including in open source projects.

      Cross-platform app developers can now use PCL

      imagePortable class libraries are a great option for app developers building for Microsoft platforms in Visual Studio, to share key business functionality across Microsoft platforms. Many developers use the PCL technology today, for example, to share app logic across Windows Store and Windows Phone. Today’s announcement enables developers using Xamarin’s tools to share these libraries as well.

      In Visual Studio, you’ll continue to use Portable Class Library projects but will be able to reference them from within Xamarin’s tools for VS. That means that you can write rich cross-platform libraries and take advantage of them from all of your .NET apps.

      The following image demonstrates an example set of .NET NuGet library references that you can use within one of your portable libraries. The .NET NuGet libraries will enable new scenarios and great new libraries built on top of them.

      You can build cross-platform libraries with .NET

      This announcement also benefits .NET developers writing reusable and open source libraries. You’ve probably used some of these libraries, for example Json.NET. These developers have been very vocal about wanting this change. This announcement greatly benefits those library developers, enabling them to leverage our portable libraries in their libraries.

      Getting started with portable libraries and Xamarin

      You can start by building portable libraries in Visual Studio, as you can see in the screenshot above. You can take advantage of the portable libraries that we released today. Write code!

      You’ll need an updated NuGet client, to take advantage of this new scenario. Make sure that you are using NuGet 2.7.2 or higher, or just download the latest NuGet for your VS version from the Installing NuGet page.

      We are working closely with Xamarin to ensure that our NuGet libraries work well with Xamarin tools, as well as PCL generally. Please tell us if you find any issues. We’ll get them resolved and post them to our known issues page.

      Thank You

      Thank you for the feedback on UserVoice. With today’s announcement, we can mark the request to Remove the platform restriction on Microsoft NuGet packages as complete. Thanks to Phil Haack for filing the issue. Coupled with our collaboration with Xamarin, .NET developers have some compelling tools, especially for targeting mobile devices.

      Both Microsoft and Xamarin want to see this scenario succeed. We’d love your feedback. Please tell us how the new features are working for you.

      This post was written by Rich Lander, a Program Manager on the .NET Team.

      [Some] Comments

      Immo Landwerth [MSFT] 13 Nov 2013 1:24 PM

      Thanks a lot for the kind words!

      @Curt: We absolutely understand that PCL support in Visual Studio express editions is super important to many of our developers. That’s why it’s on our list. However, I can’t promise that we actually end up delivering it in the VS 2013 time frame. As you’ve seen today, there is a lot of great stuff going on and resources are always more scarce than one would hope.

      Gz 14 Nov 2013 4:19 AM

      Xamarin is great but their pricing is insane! even with the MSDN discount. We’re a tiny start-up development house that has benefited from the MS BizSpark programme and we simply cannot stretch to paying out a thousand bucks per platform, per year, per developer – mobile isn’t even a revenue generator for us – it would merely be extending some functionality from our main apps to mobile and we’d give it to customers for free. I know they have a free & an indie edition blah blah blah but we wanna work in VS. The good news is that Xamarin will soon have a competitor in this space that could potentially blow them out of the water with full VS support and direct access to native APIs on each platform (iOS, Android & Mac) and their pricing will be less than 1/3rd of Xamarin’s. I’ve been sworn to secrecy about it but expect to have a cost-effective Xamarin alternative before the end of the year. (No I don’t work for the company, just got some info about it recently).

      Stilgar 14 Nov 2013 8:30 AM

      I second the need for PCLs in Express editions. Otherwise your company’s constant claims that the tooling for Windows 8 and Windows Phone development is free is pure hypocrisy.

      TL;DR: You can now (legally) use our .NET OData client and ODataLib on Android and iOS.

      Backstory

      For a while now we have been working with our legal team to improve the terms you agree to when you use one of our libraries (WCF Data Services, our OData client, or ODataLib). A year and a half ago, we announced that our EULA would include a redistribution clause. With the release of WCF Data Services 5.6.0, we introduced portable libraries for two primary reasons:

        1. Portable libraries reduce the amount of duplicate code and #ifdefs in our code base.

        2. Portable libraries increase our reach through third-party tooling like Xamarin (more on that later).

          It took some work to get there, and we had to make some sacrifices along the way, but we are now focused exclusively on portable libraries for client-side code. Unfortunately, our EULA still contained a clause that prevented the redistributable code from being legally used on a platform other than Windows.

          OData and Xamarin: Extending developer reach to many platforms

          We are really excited about Microsoft’s new collaboration with Xamarin. As Soma says, this collaboration will allow .NET developers to broaden the reach of their applications and skills. This has long been the mantra of OData – a standardized ecosystem of services and consumers that enables consumers on any platform to easily consume services developed on any platform. This collaboration will make it much easier to write a shared code base that allows consumption of OData on Windows, Android or iOS.

          EULA change

          To fully enable this scenario, we needed to update our EULA. We, along with several other teams at Microsoft, are rolling out a new EULA today that has relaxed the distribution requirements. Most importantly, we removed the clause that prevented redistributable code from being used on Android and iOS.

          The new EULA is effective immediately for all of our NuGet packages. This means that (even though we already released 5.6.0) you can create a Xamarin project today, take a new dependency on our OData client, and legally run that application on any platform you wish.

          Thanks

          As always, we really appreciate your feedback. It frequently takes us some time to react, but the credit for this change is due entirely to customer feedback. We hear you. Keep it coming.

          Thanks,
          The OData Team

          Q3’13 smartphone and overall mobile phone markets: Android smartphones surpassed 80% of the market, with Samsung increasing its share to 32.1% against Apple’s 12.1% only; while Nokia achieved a strong niche market position both in “proper” (Lumia) and “de facto” (Asha Touch) smartphones

          November 14, 2013 9:19 pm / Leave a comment

          Details about Samsung’s strengths you can find inside the Samsung has unbeatable supply chain management, it is incredibly good in everything which is consumer hardware, but vulnerability remains in software and M&A [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Nov 11, 2013] post of mine.

          My findings supporting the above title:

          • 205 million Android smartphones were delivered in Q3’13, representing 15.2% growth sequentially (Q/Q) and 67.3% growth relative to the same period of last year (Y/Y)
          • Meanwhile the number of Apple iPhones shipped increased only to 33.8 million, growing by 8.3% sequentially (Q/Q), but still representing a 25.65% growth relative to the same period of last year (Y/Y)
          • The shipment of “proper” smartphones from Nokia (S60/Symbian and Lumia/Windows Phone) increased to 8.8 million units, representing 18.9% growth sequentially (Q/Q) and 39.7% growth relative to the same period of last year (Y/Y)

          image

          Than for the lead smartphone market, i.e. Mainland China I will include here:

          There were 102.66 million handsets sold in the China market during the third quarter of 2013, growing 13.6% on quarter and 54.5% on year, of which 93.08 million units were smartphones, increasing 20.7% on quarter and 89.3% on year, according to China-based consulting company Analysys International.

          image

          While for the worldwide market:

          Lenovo, ZTE, Huawei and Yulong/Coolpad have taken advantage of the surging low-end smartphone market. According to IC Insights, the four major China-based handset companies are forecast to ship 168 million smartphones in 2013 and together hold a 17% share of the worldwide smartphone market.
          Lenovo, ZTE, Huawei and Yulong/Coolpad shipped a combined 98 million smartphones in 2012, a more than 300% surge from the 29 million units shipped in 2011, IC Insights disclosed. It should be noted that the China-based suppliers of smartphones are primarily serving the China and Asia-Pacific marketplace, and offer low-end models that typically sell for less than US$200.
          Low-end smartphones are expected to represent just under one-third (310 million) of the total 975 million smartphones shipped in 2013. IC Insights forecast that by 2017, low-end smartphone shipments will represent 46% of the total smartphone market with China and the Asia-Pacific region to remain the primary markets for these low-end models.
          Samsung Electronics and Apple are set to continue dominating the total smartphone market in 2013. The two vendors are forecast to ship 457 million units and together hold a 47% share of the total smartphone market in 2013, IC Insights said. In 2012, Samsung and Apple shipped 354 million smartphones and took a combined 50% share of the total smartphone market.
          Nokia was third-largest supplier of smartphones behind Samsung and Apple in 2011, but has seen its share of the smartphone market fall. Nokia’s smartphone shipments are forecast to decline by another 4% and grab an only 3% share of the total smartphone market in 2013, IC Insights indicated.
          Other smartphone producers that have fallen on hard times include RIM and HTC. While each of these companies had about a 10% share of the smartphone market in 2011, IC Insights estimated they will have only about 2% shares of the 2013 smartphone market.

          image

          Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totaled 455.6 million units in the third quarter of 2013, an increase of 5.7 percent from the same period last year, according to Gartner, Inc. Sales of smartphones accounted for 55 percent of overall mobile phone sales in the third quarter of 2013, and reached their highest share to date.

          Worldwide smartphone sales to end users reached 250.2 million units, up 45.8 percent from the third quarter of 2012. Asia/Pacific led the growth in both markets – the smartphone segment with 77.3 percent increase and the mobile phone segment with 11.9 percent growth. The other regions to show an increase in the overall mobile phone market were Western Europe, which returned to growth for the first time this year, and the Americas.

          “Sales of feature phones continued to decline and the decrease was more pronounced in markets where the average selling price (ASP) for feature phones was much closer to the ASP affordable smartphones,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. “In markets such as China and Latin America, demand for feature phones fell significantly as users rushed to replace their old models with smartphones.”

          Gartner analysts said global mobile phone sales are on pace to reach 1.81 billion units in 2013, a 3.4 percent increase from 2012. “We will see several new tablets enter the market for the holiday season, and we expect consumers in mature markets will favor the purchase of smaller-sized tablets over the replacement of their older smartphones” said Mr. Gupta.

          While Samsung’s share was flat in the third quarter of 2013, Samsung increased its lead over Apple in the global smartphone market (see Table 1). The launch of the Samsung Note 3 helped reaffirm Samsung as the clear leader in the large display smartphone market, which it pioneered.
          Lenovo’s sales of smartphones grew to 12.9 million units, up 84.5 percent year-on-year. It constantly raised share in the Chinese smartphone market.
          Apple’s smartphone sales reached 30.3 million units in the third quarter of 2013, up 23.2 percent from a year ago. “While the arrival of the new iPhones 5s and 5c had a positive impact on overall sales, such impact could have been greater had they not started shipping late in the quarter. While we saw some inventory built up for the iPhone 5c, there was good demand for iPhone 5s with stock out in many markets,” said Mr. Gupta.

          image

          In the smartphone operating system (OS) market (see Table 2), Android surpassed 80 percent market share in the third quarter of 2013, which helped extend its leading position. “However, the winner of this quarter is Microsoft which grew 123 percent. Microsoft announced the intent to acquire Nokia’s devices and services business, which we believe will unify effort and help drive appeal of Windows ecosystem,” said Mr. Gupta. Forty-one per cent of all Android sales were in mainland China, compared to 34 percent a year ago. Samsung is the only non-Chinese vendor in the top 10 Android players ranking in China. Whitebox Yulong [Coolpad] is the third largest Android vendor in China with a 9.7 percent market share in the third quarter of 2013. Xiaomi represented 4.3 percent of Android sales in the third quarter of 2013, up from 1.4 percent a year ago.

          image

          Mobile Phone Vendor Perspective

          Samsung: Samsung extended its lead in the overall mobile phone market, as its market share totaled 25.7 percent in the third quarter of 2013 (see Table 3). “While Samsung has started to address its user experience, better design is another area where Samsung needs to focus,” said Mr. Gupta. “Samsung’s recent joint venture with carbon fiber company SGL Group could bring improvements in this area in future products.”
          Nokia: Nokia did better than anticipated in the third quarter of 2013, reaching 63 million mobile phones, thanks to sales of both Lumia and Asha series devices. Increased smartphone sales supported by an expanded Lumia portfolio, helped Nokia move up to the No. 8 spot in the global smartphone market. But regional and Chinese Android device manufacturers continued to beat market demand, taking larger share and creating a tough competitive environment for Lumia devices.
          Apple:  Gartner believes the price difference between the iPhone 5c and 5s is not enough in mature markets, where prices are skewed by operator subsidies, to drive users away from the top of the line model. In emerging markets, the iPhone 4S will continue to be the volume driver at the low end as the lack of subsidy in most markets leaves the iPhone 5c too highly priced to help drive further penetration.
          Lenovo: Lenovo moved to the No. 7 spot in the global mobile phone market, with sales reaching approximately 13 million units in the third quarter of 2013. “Lenovo continues to rely heavily on its home market, which represents more than 95 per cent of its overall mobile phone sales. This could limit its growth after 2014, when the Chinese market is expected to decelerate,” said Mr. Gupta.

          image

          The tablet market in Q1-Q3’13: It was mainly shaped by white-box vendors while Samsung was quite successfully attacking both Apple and the white-box vendors with triple digit growth both worldwide and in Mainland China

          November 14, 2013 4:11 pm / Leave a comment

          Details about Samsung’s strengths you can find inside the Samsung has unbeatable supply chain management, it is incredibly good in everything which is consumer hardware, but vulnerability remains in software and M&A [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Nov 11, 2013] post of mine.

          Note what was communicated in the 2013 global tablet forecast [Dec 11, 2012]:

          • imageDIGITIMES Research forecasts that global tablet shipments (including both branded and white box models) will overtake notebook shipments in 2013, growing by 38.3% on 2012 levels to hit 210 million units.
          • Shipments of branded tablets alone are forecast to reach 140 million units. That is the shipment of white box tablets is forecast to grow to more than 70 million units in 2013. [NS: Q1-Q3’: 62.6 million]
          • DIGITIMES Research also projects that global shipments of branded and white box tablets will top 300 million by 2015, with branded devices accounting for more than 200 million units and white box tablets for around 100 million.

          My findings behind the title statement:

          • White-box vendors from Mainland China delivered 62.6 million tablets in Q1-Q3’13 vs. 35.4 million a year ago (76.8% growth) per DIGITIMES Research
            (the two latest sources used for that are included in the end)
          • Apple delivered 48.2 million tablets in Q1-Q3’13 vs. 42.8 million a year ago (12.6% growth) per IDC
            (the IDC sources used are the corresponding quarterly press releases)
          • Samsung delivered 27.3 million tablets in Q1-Q3’13 vs. 8.7 million a year ago (214% growth) per IDC (with a H1’13 correction from Samsung itself)
          • IDC’s latest forecast couldn’t take properly into the account the group of white-box vendors (44.6 million in “Others” category vs. 62.6 million), even more than a year ago (25.8 million in “Others” category vs. 35.4 million)
          • With such error for Q1-Q3’13 there was a 142.6 million strong worldwide market by IDC vs. 76.4 million a year ago (86.7% growth)
          • Together the white-box vendors, Apple and Samsung, as the market changing vendors/vendor group delivered 132.7 million tablets in Q1-Q3’13 vs. 86.9 million a year ago (52.7% growth)
          • Meanwhile the “Others” group (with improper inclusion of white-box vendors) by IDC delivered 49.8 million tablets in Q1-Q3’13 vs. 25.8 million a year ago (93% growth)

          image

          • Mainland China had a 4.4 million strong tablet market in Q3’13 vs. the 44.6 million worldwide market as per IDC. Since white-box vendors sold 25 million tablets worldwide (according to DIGITIMES Reasearch) in Q3’13 vs. only 16.8 million sales in the ‘Others’ category by IDC we can safely raise the 49.8 million number by upto 10 million to upto 60 million. This means that in the current quarter Mainland China constituted at least 8.8% of the worldwide tablet market.
          • The sequential (Q/Q) growth rate on the Mainland China market per Analysis Int. is:
            image
          • Meanwhile the sequential (Q/Q) growth rate on the worldwide market per IDC is:
            image
          • This means that Mainland China has much less seasonality than the worldwide market, which is a sign of greater untapped tablet demand than in other markets of the world. Considering the fact that an unusually large group of local tablet vendors are playing the local brand game in China, while the white-box vendor game outside, any global brand tablet vendor should already participate in the Mainland China market in order to succeed worldwide. Lenovo, Samsung and Microsoft have clearly recognised this:


          image          (the two latest Analysis International sources used for that are indicated later)

          image

          • Samsung has dramatically increased its market penetration efforts in Q3’13 and succeeded quite well. In fact it was able to push back somewhat the growth rate of the group of local brand vendors (from 170% Q/Q growth rate in Q2’13 to 150% in Q3’13) while significantly increased its own growth rate (from 170% to a whopping 220%).

          image

          • Therefore, if things stay as it is (see the above chart) Samsung will outgrow local brand vendors on the Mainland China market within a year.
          • Otherwise, if the group of local brand vendors will be able to withstand Samsung’s local efforts and significantly improve the value of their own brands, then the outlook may return to a view which could have been forecasted after Q2’13 (see the below chart):

          image

          • Meanwhile two local brands, Teclast (台电) and Onda (昂达) each were able to beat two other global brands, Asus and Acer, on the Mainland China market in the last two quarters.
          • The group of ‘Others’, i.e. other local brands taken together were able to grow by similar rate in the last two quarters which shows that with an ongoing consolidation of the local brands (details ommitted here) a few local brands may join Teclast and Onda as the strongest local vendors which will have an opportunity to change their white-box vendor status abroad (and grow globally under their own brand as well).

          image

          image

          The Q3’13 and Q2’13 Analysys International sources:
          – Nov 8, 2013: http://www.enfodesk.com/SMinisite/maininfo/articledetail-id-389539.html
          – Aug 28, 2013: http://www.enfodesk.com/SMinisite/maininfo/articledetail-id-376953.html

          The Q3’13 and Q2’13 DIGITIMES Research sources:

          China white-box tablet shipments reached about 25 million units in the third quarter of 2013, up 56.3% sequentially and 40.4% on year thanks to strong overseas shipments, which accounted for 80% of the total volume. Among white-box tablet shipments, 7-inch models accounted for the largest share, while 8-inch models, which were originally expected to become new star products, were unable to do so because of high costs from the bezel design and limited supply of 8-inch panels.
          Although white-box tablets are expected to see extraordinary growth in 2013, they are also expected to face more obstacles and challenges in the future. First, they will see strong price competition from large brand vendors, which will offer Android-based products at price levels similar to those of white-box models. Second, the tablet market will gradually reach saturation and should no longer see demand as strong as before.
          Third, white-box tablet costs have already hit the bottom margin, causing related assembly service providers and component suppliers to see limited profits. Several unhealthy players were already been eliminated from the market at the end of the second quarter, while the remaining players will need to rely on pumping up their shipments to support their profitability. However, such a strategy is unlikely to sustain for long, Digitimes Research noted.
          Digitimes Research also found that white-box tablets in Europe or North America are mostly used as gifts in product promotions or bundling deals and therefore specifications are not as high as those of regular tablets. As for emerging markets such as Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America, most consumers are buying white-box tablets with a single-core processor, because of limited purchasing power.
          As for application processors (APs), 70% of white-box tablets with phone functions adopted solutions from MediaTek in the third quarter, replacing the solutions from China-based Allwinner, the original favorite. Digitimes Research estimates that the proportion of white-box Wi-Fi-only tablets using MediaTek’s solution will also increase dramatically starting the fourth quarter, further impacting China-based Allwinner and Rockchip’s AP shipments. In addition to low prices, China-based AP suppliers will also need to consider how to create additional value for their APs to survive the competition.
          White-box tablet shipments reached only 15.9 million units in the second quarter of 2013, down 26.3% sequentially due to weakening tablet demand in May and June. Many smaller white-box players were also forced to quit the market, according to Digitimes Research’s latest figures.
          Although white-box tablet shipments peaked in April 2013, increasing component costs and the fact that consumers are becoming more sensitive over tablet pricing, are impacting white-box players’ profitability.
          For component supply, China-based chipmakers’ competition is gradually becoming fierce for both single-core and dual-core processors. In August 2013, some single-core processor prices were as low as US$5. By the end of 2013, dual-core processor will become the basic specification for entry-level white-box tablets, while mid-range models will turn to quad-core processor completely, Digitimes Research noted.
          DRAM and NAND Flash remained at high price points in the second quarter of 2013, but as related players are increasing their supplies in the third quarter, prices are dropping.
          As for panels, an entry-level 7-inch TN panel was priced at about US$10-11 at the beginning of the third quarter, and the price has been rising. Although the industry is seeing tight panel supply, the issue is expected to be eased as more panel players will open up new production lines to manufacture small-to-medium size panels in the first half of 2014.
          White-box vendors’ over-optimism about demand in the first half created high tablet inventories for the vendors. Weak demand in Europe and North America has affected sales of both first-tier brand vendors and white-box players.
          As for China, local first-tier brand vendors’ increasing sales have impacted white-box models’ demand in the country. Emerging markets such as India, Russia, countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia, are only providing limited contributions to white-box tablet players because shipments to these countries have just recently started.
          Currently, strengthening their inventory management and expanding into overseas emerging markets will be important tasks for white-box tablet players to survive in the tablet market.

          Samsung has unbeatable supply chain management, it is incredibly good in everything which is consumer hardware, but vulnerability remains in software and M&A

          November 11, 2013 6:51 pm / 1 Comment on Samsung has unbeatable supply chain management, it is incredibly good in everything which is consumer hardware, but vulnerability remains in software and M&A

          Crisis Message of Aug 29, 2015 from Hunbiased: Immigration which I very much felt to share here before anything else of my own: “ Immigration is *the* topic in the news in Hungary. It’s what all newscasts lead with and it’s the issue that dominates the front pages. How bad is the situation?  I take a look at some basic figures to see whether or not the current EU policies regarding immigration are fair and answer the question, “if Hungary is expected to absorb 140,000 people without batting an eyelid, how many people should Germany and the UK take?” ”

          Samsung has unbeatable supply chain management, it is incredibly good in everything which is consumer hardware, but vulnerability remains in software and M&A

          This is what people with software engineering background cannot understand at all and therefore significantly overestimate Microsoft’s chances to succeed in the consumer device space.

          Previously I discussed on the ‘Experiencing the Cloud’:

          which clearly indicated quite a number of exceptional corporate qualities of Samsung.

          Now I will have a discussion heavily focussed on Samsung’s extraordinary strengths (from SCM to the Samsung Memory business), as well as on the company’s most pressing weaknesses (software and M&A) based on Samsung Analyst Day 2013, Nov 6, 2013, reflecting the below presentations and their reports in the worldwide media:image
          See as well: As It Happened: Samsung’s Analyst Day [live blog on The Wall Street Journal Asia, Nov 6, 2013] and an analytic reflection of that Across Fonblets and Phablets Samsung Has 63% Share of all Android Mobile Devices [Localystics, Nov 7, 2013].

          Accordingly this post contains the following sections:

          1. Samsung Supply Chain Management (SCM) information
            1. Historic Samsung SCM information
          2. Market/Business-specific current and strategic information
            1. Smartphones
            2. Phablets (‘Fonblets’ per Samsung)
            3. Tablets
            4. Wearable devices
            5. New [mobile/device] Market: The Next Big Thing
            6. Samsung System LSI
            7. Samsung Display
            8. Samsung Memory Business
            9. Software
            10. Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As)

          1. Samsung Supply Chain Management (SCM) information

          image

          Supply Chain Management (SCM) [Samsung SDS, Aug 27, 2013]

          Supply Chain Management (SCM) is a comprehensive and innovative activity, including process, system, and governance, which optimizes marketing, sales, development, manufacturing, purchasing, logistics, and service over the entire supply chain. We support the successful SCM innovation of your business by offering globally competitive services such as SCM diagnosis, Process Innovation (PI), integration establishment, Cello [Supply Chain Logistics – SCL] solution.
          image
          • Demand Satisfaction
            Increase in demand forecast accuracy and supply ability index
          • Increased Market Response Ability
            Improved adherence to deadlines and shortened lead time in setting up plans
          • Global SCM Establishment and Integration
            Setting up and carrying out Global Single Plan in the Governance system

          image

          image

          We are Samsung SDS! [SamsungSDSA (Samsung SDS America) YouTube channel, June 24, 2013]

          From Samsung SDS leads in ‘shared growth’ [The Korea Times, Oct 30, 2013]

          In July this year, it realigned structures into the following six ㅡ smart town, smart manufacturing, smart convergence, smart security, smart logistics and smart ICT outsourcing for customized approaches to existing and future clients, according to the statement.

          Service Overview [Samsung SDS, March 29, 2013] (see also: Overview – Vision – History – Global Network >> Samsung Data System, established in May 1985)

          image
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          1/A Historic Samsung SCM information:

          The Samsung Group of companies is recognized as a leading global manufacturing, financial, and services conglomerate. It was founded in 1938 and focused its businesses on areas such as textiles, shipbuilding, machinery, and chemicals. Since the 1980s, the group has made enormous efforts and investment in the electronics and semiconductor industry. As a result, the Samsung Group has experienced a dramatic growth in net profits since the 1990s. The flagship unit, Samsung Electronics Company (SEC), was one of only two manufacturing companies worldwide to post profits of more than $10bn in 2004 (Toyota Motors being the other). Many regard these successes as reflecting a continuous and relentless effort at Samsung to improve the way it conducts business. For the last few years, SCM and six sigma have been two pillars of business innovation at Samsung.
          The Samsung Group of companies has large, complex, global supply chains in most of the products it manufactures and makes extensive use of SCM solutions and process innovations to support and improve its operations. Most notably, at SEC, advanced planning and scheduling (APS) systems have been adopted since the 1990s and have brought the company many successes in terms of operational excellence. Recently, Samsung Electronics was ranked seventh in a respected analyst’s ranking of the global top 25 companies in supply chain excellence.
          Six sigma has been a key enabler for the group’s success. The Chairman of the Group proclaimed the adoption of a business innovation approach called “new management” in 1993. “New management” is the pursuit of quality-oriented management in business operations as well as in manufacturing. Along with the “quality movement” in industry, new management evolved from initial product quality assurance but later shifted its focus to include the quality of the entire business process, which is the rationale behind six sigma. The outcomes were high-quality, innovative product developments, and consequently an increase in customer satisfaction and profits, and are well demonstrated by many of the world’s best technological resources.
          …
          Samsung’s SCM Business Team (SBT) researched six sigma approaches at General Electric (GE), DuPont and Honeywell to get perspectives on how other companies have innovatively applied six sigma to similar needs: … Each of the above approaches was analyzed and the following conclusions drawn, which fed into the subsequent development of the Samsung SCM six sigma methodology: …
          …
          Future direction
          Today, there are various approaches and systems available for process innovation. Six sigma and supply chain management (SCM) are among those techniques aiming for process and quality improvement, and synchronization of a company’s value chain, from inbound logistics to sales and customer services.
          At Samsung, SCM and six sigma have been two important enablers for the group’s management innovation and growth. However, Samsung realize that there is significant room for improvement in its SCM operation. Thus, the effort has been synthesizing SCM and six sigma and developing a unique six-sigma based methodology to improve its SCM operation.
          Samsung’s effort and investment has turned out to be fruitful. Their SCM six sigma program has produced highly qualified and talented SCM specialists, who are currently training the methodology to other members in their organizations and leading SCM projects. SCM projects are being prepared and conducted in a more disciplined way and their outcomes are continuously monitored and shared through Samsung’s repository for six sigma. Samsung’s endeavour for global optimum is continuing and SCM six sigma is expected to play an enabling role.
          imageSamsung Electronics, a leading Korean company as well as a symbol of the IT industry, carried out an innovative project to strengthen its global Supply Chain Management (SCM) execution ability, gaining the industry’s interest. Samsung Electronics placed its emphasis on the business management scenario of predicting and preparing for future environmental changes and competitiveness, which is one of the survival strategies of an industry with an unpredictable future. The company is aggressively establishing the foundation for enhancing business management speed and efficiency-oriented business management innovations since early this year. In accordance with this type of scenario, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) Platform provided life to Samsung Electronics’ SCM system. Samsung Electronics decided to implement an action-oriented BI solution that enables on-demand changes of business management plans and reflects these adjustments. As such, it decided to deploy SQL Server 2008, which can satisfy all three major requirements of BI solution, including ‘performance and reliability’, ‘cube write-back’ and ‘user convenience’, and the company is thoroughly experiencing the benefits of this IT innovation. In the face of enterprise-wide application, it has completed application in only its video display business division, so it is still too early to mention any fixed quantity of benefits. However, with this system implementation, Samsung Electronics expects to increase its forecast accuracy for product demands by more than 20%.

          2. Market/Business-specific current and strategic information

          2/A Smartphones:

          imageSamsung executives said the biggest growth in smartphones would come in developing countries, where smartphone penetration remains lower. Worldwide, the company said, there are still three billion more basic “feature phones” in use.

          “We believe there is substantial room for smartphone demand to grow,” said J.K. Shin, head of Samsung’s mobile division.

          Mr. Shin said the company also intended to increase its market share in tablet computers, where it still trails Apple. Other executives painted a bullish picture even on televisions and home appliances, areas in which sales have been growing slowly or shrinking in recent years.
          imageAt a rare analyst day event held in Seoul today, Samsung’s JK Shin announced that the company had sold more than 100 million Galaxy smartphones and Note phablets this year alone. … While the industry is expecting the high-end smartphone segment to slow down, Samsung is anticipating that the premium smartphone segment will outgrow market forecasts and is also gearing up for ultra premium smartphones. The company is rumored to launch a Galaxy F range of ultra-premium smartphones next year. … Overall, Shin believes that Samsung’s smartphone division still has room to grow with upcoming LTE deployments and the company’s innovations around bendable displays and companion devices.
          Samsung’s stock price plunged 15 percent in June after JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley cut their profit outlooks, citing weaker-than-expected demand for its flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S4. However, the company is rebounding, having sold more than 40 million Galaxy S4s as of last month, according to executives. … It sold about 120 million handsets in the third quarter, researcher Strategy Analytics said on Oct. 29.
          image… “People say the growth of the premium smartphone market will slow, but we don’t think so,” said Shin. “There are lots of opportunities for growth in various areas.” Shin said the market for Long-Term Evolution (LTE) smartphones, the fastest broadband devices, will grow 30 percent on average through 2017. About 680 million smartphones will be shipped in 2017, half of them LTE enabled, he said. [correctly from ZDNet: “The expansion of new LTE services, including LTE Advanced, will be the key growth driver,” said Jong-Kyun Shin, president and CEO of Samsung IT & Mobile Communication at an analyst event in Seoul on Wednesday. “Until 2017, we expect an annual average growth of near 30 percent in the LTE smartphone market, reaching 680 million units.” Shin said that come 2017, half [45%] of all phones sold will be LTE phones.]
          imageThe craziest announcement was that 5.2-inch 560 PPI AMOLED smartphone displays are due in 2014, with 3840×2160 displays following in 2015. Assuming a screen size of around five inches, 3840×2160 (UHD, 4K) works out to be around 880 pixels per inch. By virtue of being based on OLED tech rather than LCD, Samsung says that the next few years will see lots of flexible displays being used in curved and bent devices, with foldable devices arriving around 2016. (Read: 8K UHDTV: How do you send a 48Gbps TV signal over terrestrial airwaves?)
          … Is it really beneficial to keep pushing pixel densities as quickly as Moore’s law allows? The higher the pixel count, the more energy a display consumes. Considering our eyes have a tough time seeing the difference between 200 and 300 PPI, let alone 441 (current 5-inch smartphones) and next year’s 560 PPI, it seems a little counterintuitive to intentionally reduce battery life for negligible gain. Yes, Samsung and its users get to wave their huge PPIs in the face of the Apple opposition — but is that really what the smartphone market has come to?
          imageJK Shin, Samsung’s president and chief executive of IT & Mobile (the business segment of Samsung Electronics that compares closely with Apple), outlined his outlook for the smartphone and tablet markets, promising that the company would “play a key role in the premium smartphone market.” He stated that from Samsung’s perspective, the premium market will continue to outgrow market forecasts, an apparent reversal of the company’s warnings from the beginning of the year about increasing competition in the plateauing market for premium Android smartphones.
          That also seems to contradict Samsung’s sales results throughout the year. The company just stated that in its September quarter, premium smartphone sales “stayed about the same” rather than keeping pace with Apple’s growth, which comes entirely from premium smartphones.
          imageJK Shin added that the global smartphone penetration rate is only at 21 percent so far, meaning there’s plenty of room for growth. Worldwide, about one billion smartphones will ship this year, with data from Strategy Analytics suggesting that’ll grow to 1.5 billion by 2015.

          2/B Phablets (‘Fonblets’ per Samsung):

          imageBy introducing its Galaxy Note product, Samsung highlighted its status as the creator of‘Fonblet’ market with large display, portability and handwriting technology. We believe that Samsung has a high hope for the big-sized smartphone market with over 5 inch display, which we define as phablet. Also it made us predict that Samsung may be working on a completely new type of ‘Fonblet’ to target both smartphone and tablet segments at the same time in around 2015 or 2016 timeframe.

          2/C Tablets:

          imageA top executive, Shin Jong-kyun, told analysts on Wednesday that Samsung’s tablet business is growing rapidly and the company will become the biggest maker of tablet computers. He didn’t give a timeframe. Shin said Samsung’s tablet sales will exceed 40 million units this year, more than double sales in 2012. “Samsung tablet shipments started to grow remarkably since the second half of last year,” he said.
          Research group IDC estimates that Samsung sold 16.6 million tablets in image2012, lagging far behind Apple Inc. which sold 65.7 million iPads. But Samsung is on the rise, capturing 20 percent market share in the July-September quarter while Apple, which led the commercialization of tablet computing, fell to 30 percent. Apple previously had more than half of the global tablet market but its dominance has eroded as Samsung boosted sales with cheaper Galaxy Tab computers that offer many different screen sizes.
          Source: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24420613

          according to which the Q3’13 Samsung tablet sales is 9.7 million, i.e. with H1’13 17.6 million the Q1-Q3’13 Samsung tablet sales are already 27.3 million units.

          2/D Wearable devices:

          imageSpeaking at the company’s Analyst Day, Samsung Vice Chairman and CEO Kwon Oh-hyun said Wednesday that his company has been dedicating significant resources to several technologies, including “wearables,” according to the Wall Street Journal, which was in attendance at the event. The slide to accompany his comment showed the Galaxy Gear smartwatch and also eyeglasses that might compete with Google Glass.
          Rumors have been swirling that Samsung is at work on smart eyewear. Last month, a patent filing surfaced in Korea for Samsung eyewear. That application indicated that the device would be connected directly to a smartphone and feature built-in earphones.
          Samsung has not announced any plans to launch a Google Glass competitor, but Kwon’s comments seem to indicate such a device is coming.
          Samsung surprised attendees at its analyst day by announcing it will be bringing fully foldable screens to the market “sometime in 2015” and even teased the product with a chintzy promo video. Although the video’s focus was on phone and tablet combinations, the real opportunity here is in wearable tech—Apple and Google should be on notice. Samsung could have a game changer with its foldable screen.
          As the market for smartphones and tablets continues to become more contested, tech companies are increasingly looking at new growth opportunities. They may have found it in wearable tech: According to Juniper Research, worldwide imagespending on wearable tech will hit $1.4 billion this year and increase to $19 billion by 2018. Of these companies, Samsung has the most recent commercial product launch of these new generation of wearable tech products with its Galaxy Gear smart watch. So far, the product has witnessed tepid demand and modest reviews—mostly due to the fact it must be tethered to other Galaxy products for full functionality.

          2/E New [mobile/device] Market: The Next Big Thing

          imageInteresting to note here that, in tandem with talk of shareholder-friendly dividend increases, Samsung is also talking up growth, growth, growth. Mr. Shin just ticked off wearable devices, flexible devices, big data, the Internet of things [, and convergence]– “and much more” — as growth opportunities for the mobile division. “Therefore, we expect another huge growth in the mobile market in the near future,” Mr. Shin says.
          …
          Mr. Shin touches on big data, saying that the company will encorporate big data technology in providing software features for its devices. He says the company aims for a “fully integrated” user experience across all Samsung devices.

          2/F Samsung System LSI:

          imageAlluding to Apple’s custom 64-bit A7 Application Processor (which Samsung is manufacturing), [Dr. Namsung Stephen] Woo[, president of Samsung’s System LSI] said “many people were thinking ‘why do we need 64-bit for mobile devices?’ People were asking that question until three months ago, and now I think nobody is asking that question. Now people are asking ‘when can we have that? And will software run correctly on time?'”
          Woo told his audience, “let me just tell you, we are… we have planned for it, we are marching on schedule. We will offer the first 64-bit AP based on ARM’s own core [reference design]. “For the second product after that we will offer even more optimized 64-bit based on our own optimization. So we are marching ahead with the 64-bit offering, and even though it’s a little too early, I think we are at the leader group in terms of 64-bit offerings.” … Woo … offered no comment on how Samsung planned to support existing software on its planned 64-bit offerings, nor even whether such a chip would get custom Android support or use Samsung’s own Tizen or some other operating system.

          2/G Samsung Display:

          image

          According to ZDNet Korea, it looks like Samsung is going to focus on a particular type of tablets, AMOLED ones. So far, the tech giant has released only a handful of AMOLED display devices, so it will be pretty interesting to see what else gets produced.

          A patent of a foldable mobile device filed with authorities in South Korea last month gave some clues as to the future of Samsung mobile devices.
          But at an analyst day on Wednesday, some investors saw prototypes of a range of foldable mobile devices that Samsung is testing,  giving more details  on what they would actually do and look like. Reporters were banned from the conference and were not given access to see the prototypes, while the attendees were not permitted to take any photos inside the venue.
          “The first one they showed us was the size of a [Galaxy] S3 smartphone which can be folded in half from top to bottom. So like a compact powder used by women,” said Jae H. Lee, an analyst with Daiwa Securities who attended the event.
          “There was also one in the size of a lengthy wallet which can be unfolded on both sides into the size of a tablet computer,” Mr. Lee said, adding that both devices looked pretty good.
          Other analysts  also seemed to be impressed.
          Such devices “would further expand Samsung’s competitive advantage in premium smartphones,” Sundeep Bajikar, an analyst with Jefferies LLC who flew in to attend the event, wrote in a research note.
          A spokesman for Samsung Display Co., which makes screens for Galaxy smartphones, said that designs displayed yesterday were “concept versions,” that do not have all the components needed to make a working smartphone.
          The products are likely years away from commercialization; Samsung Chief Executive Kwon Oh-hyun, said that “foldable displays” would be presented in 2015.

          2/H Samsung Memory Business:

          Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest memory chipmaker, vowed to take a solid lead in the global memory market with its advanced vertical NAND flash memory technology, based on plans to unveil 36-layer V-NAND flash memory chips next year.
          “Samsung will definitely, if we can, enjoy an 80 percent market share,” said Robert Myung Yi, senior vice president of Samsung Electronics’ investor relations team, on Wednesday at Samsung Analyst Day 2013, where the company laid out its mid- and long-term strategies to investors and analysts.
          A top executive from Samsung told The Korea Herald that “3-D NAND flash memory stacking 36 layers of memory cells will be mass produced by the latter half of next year.”
          Samsung is currently the sole producer of V-NAND flash memory chips with 24 layers of cells.
          This level of stacking is deemed sufficient to make the product profitable, according to Samsung.
          In terms of V-NAND market share, Yi said the firm would not just pursue higher market share, but also make efforts to secure a high profit margin as well as balance supply between the planar NAND flash memory and V-NAND flash memory. V-NAND chips’ 3-D structure gives them a higher density and capacity than their 2-D rivals.
          image
          The Korean electronics giant expects the 3-D NAND market to grow 105 percent every year until 2017, and its market size to exceed that for planar NAND flash chips next year.
          Stacking memory cells is a core technological issue for chipmakers, including Samsung’s local rival SK Hynix and U.S. chipmaker Micron Technology.
          Despite their technology for the V-NAND, other chipmakers have yet to start mass producing 3-D memory chips due in part to underachievement in cell stacking.
          SK Hynix CEO Park Sung-wook said in October that his firm, the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker, would be able to stack as many as 24 layers next year, adding, “We can do as well as Samsung.”
          In an earnings conference call later in the month, the firm announced that it would be able to start producing 3-D NAND flash memory either in the second half of next year or in 2015.
          Global competitors have also announced they would jump into the race for V-NAND production.
          Micron CEO Mark Durcan told tech news outlet CNET in August that his company would start providing samples of 3-D NAND to customers in the first quarter of 2014.
          Producers are competing to scale down planar NAND flash memory, still the top product in the chip market.
          After the technology proceeded to the 10 nanometer-class chip and beyond, the chipmakers faced more cell-to-cell interference, which risks the reliability of NAND flash memories.
          The 3-D NAND could be used for a wide range of equipment and devices including enterprise servers and solid-state drives.
          Samsung launched a V-NAND-based enterprise solid-state drive in August.

          2/I Software:

          Samsung today admitted it needs to work on software, an area it’s “not as good” at as hardware. Samsung vice chairman & CEO Kwon Oh-hyun compares the company’s software efforts to the World Series-winning Boston Red Sox’s pitching performance. Kwon notes the Red Sox led the pack in batting this year, but were only an average pitching team. His conclusion? “Even though we’re doing the software business, we’re not as good as we are in hardware.” The Red Sox still won the World Series, though, with the implication being that Samsung is “winning” at technology right now.
          It’s true that software imperfections have yet to hamper Samsung’s march to global dominance. 2013 has seen the Korean company post consecutive profit records and improve its marketshare in key areas, including strengthening its grip on the number-one spot in the smartphone market. That said, Samsung isn’t taking any chances; Kwon says that half of his Research and Development (R&D) workforce is focused on software, and the efforts to improve software are likely to grow moving forward. Given the company is currently spending over $3 billion per quarter on R&D, that represents a colossal investment in software.
          imageCompany president Lee Sang-hoon reaffirms Samsung’s focus on getting software right. “Industry-wide tech development is shifting from hardware to software.” Lee says the company’s recent efforts to acquire fresh talent from startups— including the establishment of overseas R&D centers —  are an effort to “address region-specific needs.”
          … Samsung Electronics says that around 40,000 of its 326,000 employees worldwide are software developers – roughly half of them based in South Korea.
          Samsung customises the user experience on its Android-based phones and tablets like the Galaxy Note 3 with software called TouchWiz, which is often heavily criticised for being cluttered, confusing and detracting from the standard Android experience.
          Additional features in its handsets such as “air gesture” (to move pages without touching the screen), “air view” (to enlarge previews without touching the screen) and “smart scroll” (to scroll through pages using eye movement) have been dismissed as gimmicks by some reviewers, who don’t see them bringing any value to users.
          “Industry-wide tech development is shifting from hardware to software,” said Lee Sang-hoon, Samsung’s president and chief financial officer.
          In response Samsung will aim to “reinforce our competitiveness in software platform, design and IT” through hiring more software experts, and through the use of overseas research and development centres “to address region-specific needs,” Lee said.
          South Korean Giant Weighs Software Deals to Better Compete With Apple, Google
          Samsung Electronics Co. 005930.SE -1.88% is stepping up its hunt for acquisitions and building out its presence in Silicon Valley to try and overcome its key weakness: software.
          The South Korea-based company became the world’s largest maker of smartphones by manufacturing attractive devices that hit the market quickly and cheaply.
          But to thrive in a mobile-device market increasingly dominated by software specialists likeApple Inc., AAPL +1.57% Google Inc. GOOG +0.80% and Microsoft Corp. MSFT +0.75%, which acquired Nokia Corp.’s NOK1V.HE -1.22% phone business last month, Samsung is aiming to become a software power in its own right.
          Earlier this year, Samsung was among the bidders for Israeli mobile-mapping service Waze Ltd., according to people familiar with the matter. Google eventually bought Waze for about $1.1 billion in July, a deal that is under review by the Federal Trade Commission. According to one person, Samsung had approached Waze in hopes of making a large investment and forming a partnership, before acquisition talks kicked off.
          imageSamsung has plenty of other Silicon Valley software startups in its sights, particularly in games, mobile search, social media and mapping-related services, according to employees and an internal document reviewed by the Journal.

          The document, a mergers and acquisitions presentation prepared in February by Samsung’s Media Solution Center, the arm that works on software initiatives, lays out the company’s rationale for bulking up in each category and lists potential acquisition and investment targets.

          According to the document, Samsung has evaluated startups such as Unity Technologies, a San Francisco-based developer of gaming platforms, and Green Throttle Games Inc., a Santa Clara, Calif.-based company that makes game controllers and software that connects mobile devices to televisions. It has also considered gaming pioneer Atari Inc., which Samsung could have used to offer classic games like Asteroids and Pong exclusively on its mobile phones. Atari auctioned off some of its properties this year as part of a bankruptcy filing after rejecting preliminary bids from several companies for its portfolio of games.
          Samsung has also looked closely at Glympse, a Seattle-based company that allows users to share their location with their friends—a service that Samsung says could be integrated into their phones’ native calendar and contacts functions, differentiating it from competitors.
          Samsung first reached out to Glympse in early 2012, and has raised the prospect of an equity investment, though discussions remain ongoing, according to a person familiar with the matter. Last month, Glympse unveiled an app for Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch.
          Elsewhere in the document, Samsung named Tel Aviv-based mobile search engine Everything.me as a possible target. It has also looked at video-chat app Rounds, another Israeli startup, that would help Samsung compete with Apple’s FaceTime and Google’s Hangouts.
          Samsung declined to comment on its acquisition plans—but it has made no secret of what it calls its “embracing the culture of Silicon Valley.”
          In recent months, the Suwon, South Korea-based company has broken ground on a major research facility near Apple’s offices and launched a software startup accelerator with locations in Palo Alto, Calif., and Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. It will make early-stage investments in startups, especially developers of software for Samsung devices.
          Samsung, which has $1.1 billion set aside for early-stage startup and venture capital investments in the U.S., is also poaching software engineers from its U.S. rivals and, at a hotel in San Francisco later this month, will host its first ever developers’ conference, an important step toward creating an “ecosystem” of applications unique to its devices.
          “The kind of things that happen in the Valley are really exciting to Samsung,” said David Eun, the head of Samsung’s Open Innovation Center, which operates the software-startup accelerator.
          The aggressive move into its rivals’ backyard is unusual for Samsung, a company that has historically kept its operations heavily centralized and shied away from outside deals. The emphasis on self-reliance runs so deep that Samsung manufactures some 90% of its products within its own factories.
          Privately, company executives portray the recent shift not as a repudiation of its long-term strategy, but rather as a complement to its own research and development efforts, which remain substantial.
          The company spent $10.8 billion on R&D last year, with 67,000 employees devoted to helping Samsung maintain its edge in the global television, semiconductor and home-appliance markets.
          So far, though, its attempts at developing a proprietary-software hit for its mobile phones—which account for two-thirds of Samsung’s operating profits—have fallen flat.
          Among Samsung’s recent efforts are an abandoned mobile operating system, a mobile chat service that has struggled to gain traction and coolly received technologies that anticipate hand gestures and eye movements.
          In November 2009, Samsung launched Bada, an open-source mobile operating system that it hoped could challenge Google’s Android platform. But Bada’s unfriendly user interface and poor syncing with other devices proved unpopular with consumers.
          Earlier this year, Samsung pulled the plug on Bada, rolling those efforts into a new operating system known as Tizen. There too, Silicon Valley plays a key role: Samsung is codeveloping Tizen with Intel Corp. The company has yet to release a Tizen-powered smartphone.
          If Samsung’s new operating system catches on, it could relieve the company’s reliance on Android, which powers the vast majority of Samsung’s mobile devices, including its new smartwatch.
          Breaking through with a proprietary “must-have” software application could also bolster Samsung’s position at a time when the company is vulnerable to competition from Chinese hardware makers, including Lenovo Group Ltd., Huawei Technologies Co. and Xiaomi Inc. In the most recent quarter, Samsung’s mobile business saw its operating profit margin fall to 17.7%, from 19.8% in the previous quarter amid pricing pressure from rivals and increased spending on advertising.
          Meanwhile, Google’s tie-up with Motorola Mobility in 2011, and Microsoft’s move to acquire Nokia’s mobile-phone business last month, mean that Samsung will face heightened competition from companies that, like Apple, can compete in both hardware and software.
          Samsung’s software success is far from assured. Unlike Apple, Google and Microsoft, the Korean electronics giant doesn’t have a history of software achievements. Instead, Samsung cut its teeth in the world of hardware, where efficiency, flexibility and supply-chain management are paramount.
          Acquiring its way to software dominance is no easier than building up its software capabilities organically. While Samsung has about $50 billion in cash on hand, the company has struggled in the past with deal-making. Even today, some in Silicon Valley say, Samsung has developed a reputation for kicking the tires on a range of potential deals, only rarely pulling the trigger.
          One reason for such caution is Samsung’s purchase of AST Research Inc. in the mid-1990s, an experience that still weighs heavily on company executives.
          The two-part, $840 million acquisition of Irvine, Calif.-based AST, once the world’s fifth-largest computer maker, was conceived as an attempt to break into the U.S. personal-computer market.
          Samsung sustained heavy losses in AST before ultimately giving up on the deal, which remains Samsung’s largest overseas acquisition to date. Even now, upper management remains wary of big acquisitions, in large part because of AST, employees say.
          Samsung’s recent acquisitions have been small, and focused on software developers that can help distinguish Samsung’s phones from others built on the Android platform.
          Last May, Samsung—seeking to create a credible rival to Apple’s iTunes platform—snapped up mSpot Inc., a Palo Alto, Calif.-based mobile-software developer with hopes of creating a one-stop media platform that would allow users to stream and download music on their Samsung devices.
          In the process, Samsung hoped to rival not only iTunes, but also online music-streaming services such as those offered by Sweden’s Spotify AB and Oakland, Calif.-based Pandora Media Inc.
          Earlier this year, Samsung moved mSpot into a new office with plans to double its staff by the end of 2013. Since then, however, the company’s attempts to develop the product, initially called Samsung Music Hub, have foundered.

          2/J Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As):

          Vice Chairman Kwon Oh-hyun admitted that it needs to work on software, where it is currently heavily investing to transform itself into a solutions provider from a manufacturing firm.
          Sources say Samsung prefers “Google style” expansion centered on small-sized mergers and acquisitions (M&As). It is interested in buying patents, marketing and human resources in target companies. “Samsung was passive in pursuing M&A deals. But we will become aggressive. Therefore, I don’t think our current cash-holdings are too high,” said the CFO Lee.
          Vice Chairman Kwon insisted that its edge in “vertical alignment” between components and parts will enable it create over $400 billion in annual sales in 2020. … But what’s equally interesting is that Samsung is also eager to develop components. Sharpening components-related technologies is something that really matters to it because of its plan to share confidential data with software giants such as Google and others to develop innovative products and secure advanced chips and flat-screens.

          Samsung Electronics will push for more mergers and acquisitions and increase its presence in health care and smart car industries for future growth, top executives said on Wednesday. … “Convergence (among technologies in different industries) is occurring right now, but not enough. We can create new industries, for example, health care and smart cars,” said Kwon Oh-hyun, vice chairman and CEO of the electronics firm.
          “(By converging Samsung’s information technology with cars) there are a lot (of opportunities) for us to supply to our customers.” Samsung SDI, a battery maker and an affiliate of Samsung Group, has invested in electric car batteries since 2008. It has successfully developed the products and is supplying them to BMW and Chrysler’s Fiat.
          … The vice chairman noted, “Even though our health care business is small, within the coming decade we want to be a strong player in the area,” hinting that the electronics firm will roll out more advanced, small and easy-to-handle equipment such as high-resolution CT and MRI scanners.
          Samsung Electronics wants to invest more money for new growth technologies, and part of that will come from being more aggressive in mergers and acquisitions as well as R&D.
          M&A will aim to reinforce current businesses, secure talent and find new opportunities, said Lee Sang-hoon, president and CFO of Samsung Electronics. The company has already spent about US$1 billion investing in 14 companies since 2010, which has been “somewhat conservative”.
          …
          Samsung currently has a cash pile of around US$50 billion, which is about 20 percent of its market capitalization and has attracted complaints from investors of being at a level too high at their expense. According to Lee, the war chest will now being prepared for “significant investment” in strategic technologies, mergers or acquisitions.
          “We plan to allocate a significant portion of our annual cash flow into capex and R&D to secure future growth and shareholder return,” Lee said.
          Lee said the $50 billion war chest was being prepared for “significant investment” in strategic technologies, mergers or acquisitions, suggesting the company could loosen its purse strings as it chases the next big thing in mobile technology.
          The change of tack is aimed at responding to an innovation shift in the information technology business to software from hardware, Samsung’s traditional speciality. “I know we have been somewhat conservative in M&A but it may be different in the future. Based on this, I don’t believe the current level of net cash balance is excessive,” he said. We plan to allocate a significant portion of our annual cash flow into capex and R&D to secure future growth and shareholder return.”

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