acquisition

Nokia reported 21.5 million converged devices sold in Q1.  The units, share, ASP, Revenues and Operating Profits are compared in the following table.

It's once again evident that Apple captured more profits from the iPhone than Nokia did from all its devices and services operations.

With respect to converged devices, Apple also generated more sales and had nearly triple the ASP.  Unit shares remained almost the same sequentially. Nokia did suffer more from ASP erosion sequentially as the converged ASP dropped by 24% vs. a 2.5% drop for Apple.

What is interesting from a growth perspective is that Apple's #1 position in the share of profits from mobile phones was acquired with such a low market share.  Analyst Brian Marshall said the most interesting part of Apple's story is the international growth of the iPhone. He believes that Apple has only acquired about 1.5 percent of its international carrier partners' total postpaid subscription base of 525 million. For comparison, its penetration in the U.S. peaked in Sept. 2009 on AT&T with 5 percent.

Sources:

Nokia - Investors- News Release

Apple - Investor Relations

Palm: Pacific Crest Downgrades; Merrill Cuts Target To $5; Needham Fears “Oblivion” - Tech Trader Daily - Barrons.com

Palm unveiled the webOS and Pre on Jan. 8th, and the stock skyrocketed from $3.30/share the day before to $7.14/share on Jan. 15th.

January 2009 predictions for Palm by Morgan Keegan:

About Palm at Sprint: Storm/iPhone-type Success At Sprint For the Palm Pre Would Lead to About 630k-1mm/quarter

Our 450k/quarter Estimate For Pre Look Wholly Realistic Based On Success Of Other "Hero" Campaigns

Your correspondent, January 2009:

Now that the land grab is over, expect Bono to get his payoff as Palm gets acquired by a hardware vendor desperate for relevance. As Motorola is on its knees, my bet would be on Samsung, though a bidding war with Sony Ericsson would not be a surprise.

Now I'm not so sure. Faucette of Pacific Crest today:

While we believe that Palm could ultimately be a very attractive acquisition target, we are concerned that if the company is not prudent in maintaining balance-sheet resources, any potential acquirer may be content to just wait until things become even more desperate.

When asked about the company's recent acquisitions of Quattro and Lala after yesterday's earnings report, Apple's chief financial officer Peter Openheimer answered, "In terms of Quattro and Lala we acquired Quattro because we wanted to offer a seamless way for developers to make more money on their apps, especially free apps."

As I said before: why would a developer bother with AdMob if Apple integrates ads into the SDK? Does AdMob offer better terms? Does AdMob offer more sponsors? It's the developers (and Apple indirectly) who supply inventory.