Nokia Banks on Lumia for Turnaround

Nokia hasn’t yet found a way out of its troubled waters. The company has been the leading handset maker since 1998 and reached a 40% global market share by 2008. However, the market share has significantly shrunk since to less than 29% last year. And market share continues to shrink. According to Strategy Analytics, Samsung shipped 93.5 million handsets last quarter compared with Nokia’s 82.7 million. Within the smartphone segment, Samsung and Apple’s combined market share grew from 30.3% last year to 54.8% this quarter. Over the same period, Nokia saw its smartphone market share fall from 23.5% to a mere 8.2%.

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Amazon Turns Up the Heat on Competitors With Kindle Fire

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has been focused on expanding its digital footprint. Finally, this quarter, the company’s efforts have borne results. During the previous quarter, digital products accounted for 9 of the top 10 products sold on Amazon.com. Digital sales were led by their recently launched Kindle Fire which has stormed through the Android-based tablet market. Increased digital sales helped Amazon’s revenues and earnings grow ahead of market estimates and sent their stock soaring.

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Netflix In Challenging Market

Market reports estimate that over 180 million users of the Internet in the US watch online video content. Within the U.S., 44 billion videos are viewed each month. Netflix remains the leader within the online video-by-subscription segment. According to NPD research, Netflix accounted for a 55% share in the digital movie rental business as of early this year. The market share has declined since the middle of last year, when the company controlled 59% of the U.S. market.

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Apple Continues to Execute on Steve’s Product Roadmap

Nothing seems to be stopping Apple’s growth path, as the company regained the title of the most valuable company in the world. Their strong product line-up helped them surge past market expectations on all fronts and quash analyst doubts of whether the company would be able to deliver after the loss of their visionary founder. Their products continue to gobble up market share. According to Nielsen’s research, while Android devices continue to lead the smartphone market share in the U.S., Apple’s devices are catching up. Android devices accounted for 48% of smartphone users in the market, while Apple’s iPhone was owned by 32.1% of users. Blackberry users were a distant third with an 11.6% contribution. However, a survey conducted on the users who purchased smartphones over the three-month period December 2011 through February 2012 saw that 48% of the buyers bought Android devices, while 43% chose the iPhone. The increasing popularity of the iPhone will help narrow the gap between them and Android devices.

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Yahoo’s New Direction

Yahoo’s management overhaul seems to have done good for the company. Recently released quarter results look promising as Yahoo saw performance beat market expectations. This was the first quarter since the third quarter of fiscal 2008 that the company’s revenues reported growth over the previous year.

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Newly Public Proofpoint Offers a View Into Cloud Security

Market researcher Canalys estimates that the worldwide enterprise security market will grow 8.7% this year to $22.9 billion worldwide. The anti-virus segment will retain the highest market share of the enterprise software market, contributing 11.3% of the total market value and reporting 6.8% growth over the year. Cloud security, in particular, is seeing significant adoption, and Proofpoint’s IPO indicates the beginning of several public offerings. Also in the pipeline is Qualys. Of course, the IPO pipeline for SaaS and cloud companies is significant right now. Many companies in the $75 million-$150 million range are waiting in the wings.

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Newly Public Splunk Capitalizes on Big Data and Cloud Security Trends

IDC estimates that the market for Big Data technology and services will grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $16.9 billion in 2015, translating to a 40% annual growth rate. The volume of digital information created and replicated from 2011 through 2015 is projected to grow 45% annually from 1.8 trillion gigabytes to 7.9 trillion gigabytes. Recently listed Splunk focuses on managing this data. Looking at the market’s reaction to their stock listing, it may be a company to reckon with.

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Microsoft’s New Products Move Away from the Desktop

According to Gartner’s recent estimates, worldwide PC shipments during the first quarter this year grew 1.9% over the year to 89 million units. The results are a pleasant surprise, considering the 1.2% decline that was projected by Gartner. Shipment increases were driven by growth of 6.7% growth in the EMEA and 2% in the Asia/Pacific markets, where shipments grew to 28.2 million and 30.3 million units, respectively. Japan is also seeing strong recovery following the earthquake last year, and shipments grew 11.5% to 4.4 million units. However, the Americas were weak markets, with PC shipments falling 3.5% over the year to 15.5 million units in the U.S. and Latin America showing a 3.2% decline to 9 million units.

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eBay Eyes China’s E-Buyers

According to Gartner research, the number of consumers who use mobile devices for payments is estimated to have grown 38% in 2011 to more than 141 million users. The volume of transactions over mobile devices is estimated at $86.1 billion, compared with $48.9 billion reported in 2010. Gartner believes that retail shoppers will drive the adoption of mobile payment services. Online marketplace eBay is focusing on this segment to help ensure growth in the coming quarters.

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IBM Reinforces Focus on Analytics

Earlier this month, Gartner issued their revised estimates for Q1 worldwide IT spending, and the numbers seem to be improving. The researcher now expects overall global IT spending growth in Q1 of 2012 to have been a mere 2.5% over the year compared with earlier estimates of 3.7%. But the lower figure was on account of the U.S. dollar strengthening over other currencies. Excluding telecom services, Gartner now projects annual average growth of IT spending to be 5.3% in current dollar terms and 5.9% in constant dollar terms from 2011 through 2016. For the current quarter, on a constant currency basis, Gartner now expects worldwide IT spending to grow 5.2% compared with 4.6% projected earlier. Growth during the current quarter is expected to be driven by telecom equipment, which is projected to grow at 10.3% over the year. Computing hardware, which includes PCs, mobile devices, and tablets, will account for 7% growth during the year, and software is projected to grow 7.3% over the year.

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