Apple’s Dramatic Risks and Ambitions

News from Apple is often big news. Apple released its second quarter results yesterday. Revenue was $7.51 billion, down 22% q-o-q and up 42% y-o-y driven by strong demand for Macs and the ever-popular iPhone. Net income was $1.05 billion, or $1.16 per diluted share, up 36% y-o-y. International sales, which were 44% of the

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Apple’s Component Strategy Shifts

Apple just bought a 150-person chip company, P. A. Semi, to get its own low-power microprocessor design capabilities in-house.

Marvell: Ethernet business

By Vijay Nagarajan, Guest Author In the previous articles in this series, we looked at Marvell’s product strategy, briefly reviewed the fiscal 2008 financials before dissecting the storage business area. Let us now take a look at Marvell’s position in its Ethernet semiconductor business.

Marvell: Fiscal 2008 financials

By Vijay Nagarajan, Guest Author In my previous article on Marvell, I provided a brief overview of the company strategy and product portfolio. Before we move on to dissect the various business areas, let us take a brief look at the fiscal 2008 financials.

Marvell: “A product cycle company”

By Vijay Nagarajan, Guest Author As part of our coverage of the mobile chip vendor space, we looked at Qualcomm, InterDigital, Broadcom and Texas Instruments in great detail. We now move on to another interesting and aggressive fabless semiconductor company – Marvell Technology group. Earlier coverage on Marvell can be found here, here and here.

Texas Instruments: Wireless Woes

By Vijay Nagarajan, Guest Author In the last two parts of this series, I looked at TI’s position in the analog and DSP markets. We also concluded that the OMAP was central to TI’s wireless strategy. I am afraid that TI has put all its eggs in this one basket, and has perhaps miscalculated the

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Texas Instruments: DSP Market and OMAP

By Vijay Nagarajan, Guest Author In the prequel, we discussed TI’s growing analog semiconductor business. Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) is an equally big business for the company contributing 40% of its semiconductor revenues. TI dominates the DSP market with 65% share and its products are preferred in a variety of applications ranging from communication infrastructure,

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Texas Instruments: Analog Market

By Vijay Nagarajan, Guest Author In the last part of this series, I presented a brief analysis of TI’s 2007 Financials. As I mentioned before, the company’s semiconductor business has two pillars – namely DSP and analog. While DSP has been TI’s traditional strength, analog, which is one of the largest semiconductor markets, is fast

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