By Inky
All is not well with the march of China’s ZTE in its grail to achieve a move from fourth to a podium place as global handset producer. Currently the fifth-largest manufacturer handset and fifth in the telecoms equipment league, ZTE has just posted its third consecutive fall in quarterly profit. This is due to less than sparkling telecoms spending and downward drifts in foreign exchange rates. The latest exchange rate of the US$/Chinese Yuan at the time of going to press was $1 = Y6.3070.

As well as its local Shenzen neighbour, Huawei, ZTE has moved into consumer electronics to keep pace with the burgeoning convergent market as the telecoms spend has slowed. Both vendors are now offering devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs.

Back in Q4 2011, ZTE's net profit slithered to Y991mn (US$157mn), down 48% percent from Y1.89bn a year earlier. This was seriously under the Y2.16bn prediction.

Adding to the woes, Nokia's push in China will be an important test for the Windows Phone, which has so far had limited success in Europe and the United States. The world's largest mobile maker by volume is reliant on Windows after dumping its own software platforms last year.

Nokia Chief Executive Stephen Elop introduced two models based on the Lumia 610 and Lumia 800 smartphones. The Lumia 800C will be sold without a carrier contract for Y3,599 (US$573) from April. Pricing for the cheaper 610C model, to launch in China in the second quarter, will be announced later.

Both models will use the CDMA technology of China Telecom, the nation's third-largest carrier. Nokia plans to bring all four Windows Phone models to the Chinese market in the second quarter and also adopt China Unicom's wireless technology. Shares in Nokia rose 3% to €4.116 after an upward shift in its Swedbank rating. From 2010 to 2011, Nokia saw its share of the Chinese market shrinking to 30% percent from 70%.

Both ZTE and Huawei are expected to benefit after investing around Y350bn  (US$53bn) this year upgrading and expanding their 3G technology, as together they own half the core infrastructure telecoms equipment market in China.

ZTE sells equipment in more than 140 countries and derives around half its sales overseas, making its yuan-denominated earnings vulnerable to the weakening of the euro and other currencies such as the Brazilian real.

It will take more than an army of Terracotta Warriors to halt the slide.

Slim chance

And who says there’s no money in telecoms these straitened days? Carlos Slim, the telecommunications tycoon who controls Mexico’s America Movil SAB, is the richest person on Earth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the world’s 20 wealthiest individuals.

The 72-year-old’s net worth fell US$478.4 million in a day to $68.5 billion as of the close of markets on March 2, as U.S. moguls Bill Gates and Warren Buffett placed second and third on the list compiled by Bloomberg News. Brazil’s Eike Batista, who ranks 10th, still covets the top spot after vowing a year ago that he’d become the world’s wealthiest man by 2015.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index takes measure of the world’s wealthiest people based on market and economic changes. Each net worth figure is updated every business day at 5:30 p.m. in New York.

Down, but not out
Gates, 56, co-founder of Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Washington, is worth $62.4 billion, down US$102.1 million on March 2 and up 11 percent year to date.
The fortune of Buffett, 81, chairman of Omaha, Nebraska- based Berkshire Hathaway Inc., declined US$336.9 million to US$43.8 billion on March 2 and is up 2.4 percent in 2012. Almost all of Buffett’s wealth is held in Berkshire Hathaway, the publicly traded holding company he has run since 1965.  The combined net worth of the 20 richest people is US$676.8 billion. Nine are Americans, including three from the family of Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Keep Slim happy and keep paying your bills folks as the credit control folks may not all be angels.

Moving experience
This year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) seemed to attract exhibitors from outside the traditional mobile arena – Google and eBay were examples but at least Krispy Kreme donuts were absent, at least for the moment. With the global awareness of M2M increasing and the vendor interest in telematics climbing to the fore, it was no surprise to see automotive representations on display in Barcelona. One on particular was BMW with its ConnectedDrive 730i model on display. It has been subsequently announced that from summer this year all new BMW cars in Germany will be fitted with M2M SIMs supplied by Vodafone Germany. The Vodafone SIM will provide customers with access to in-car services such as the BMW Online Services, a concierge service for BMW drivers and an emergency call function. The five-year agreement between Vodafone Germany and the BMW Group involves fitting SIM cards within the vehicles at the assembly plant. The service being provided by Vodafone is based on M2M technology, which allows different devices to communicate with each other. The European Union is planning the introduction of ‘eCall’, the automatic vehicle emergency call system which will become mandatory in new vehicles and from 2015 onwards, all new cars will be fitted with latest mobile data connection and SIM card that automatically calls the emergency services in the event of an accident.

The 80 year-old chairman of Samsung Electronics, Lee Maeng Hee is suing his younger brother Lee Kung Hee (70) over shares inherited from their late father who founded the company in South Korea back in 1938.
The chairman seeks assets worth £396mn (Won700bn) and claims that, after the death of their father in 1987, the younger brother took over the shares that belonged to other people. The claim involves eight million shares in Samsung Life insurance and others in Samsung Electronics. It all seems of out this world – perhaps from another Galaxy?

In his World Communication Day address, The Pope praised the efficiency of digital communications, while at the same time pointing out potential pitfalls, illustrating the conflict between contemplation and communication
With social media in mind he said, in concise phrases often no longer than a verse from the Bible, profound thoughts can be communicated, as long as those taking part in the conversation do not neglect to cultivate their own inner lives."
The pontiff acknowledged that today's communication process is "largely fueled by seeking advice, ideas, information and answers," which, in moderation, can help connect people. But he maintained that this also poses the danger of being "bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were unaware."
Sounds like a normal day in the Vatican?
The Vatican is not a stranger to new technologies. Around 1936 Marconi set up the first mobile radio link between The Vatican and Castel Gandolfi (The Pope’s Summer Palace) to facilitate two way voice communications, albeit analogue, and they worked.

In a leaked internal report on how UK forces responded to the disorder during the August London riots, a Police Federation review has highlighted that officers of the Metropolitan Police were forced to use their own mobile phones after the multi-million pound digital Airwave radio system collapsed.
The Police Federation review revealed that the failings of the radio network used by the Metropolitan Police was one of the reasons why the capital’s officers were ‘always approximately half-an-hour behind the rioters. This is partly why officers kept arriving at areas from where the disorder had moved on,” said the report.
It added: “Officers on the ground and in command resorted, in the majority of cases, to the use of mobile phones to co-ordinate a response.”
The company responsible for the Airwave radio system now used by police has insisted the network was not overloaded during the troubles in London. However, the internal review also reveals that after the trouble erupted, “forces often did not know how many officers they had on or off shift” and senior officers took charge in some places “often without the local knowledge of the areas”, making it easier to be out-maneuvered by rioters.
It also concluded that severe equipment shortages among officers meant they were unable to be mobilised in a public order capacity. “Mutual aid officers were often dispatched without enough equipment. They therefore could not be mobilised in a public order capacity as all the riot gear was in use,” found the investigation, compiled by the federation’s operational policing sub-committee.
Scotland Yard last week released an interim report into the riots which found there were not enough officers to deal with the unprecedented scale and spread of the disorder. Chiefs also said intelligence gathering “could not cope with the scale and speed of the spread of disorder”.
A spokesman for Airwave said the suggestion the network was overloaded, causing “significant communications failure”, was “entirely inaccurate”. “Despite the unprecedented levels of police officers and other emergency service users accessing the network, we are proud that it operated exactly as it is designed to, providing an extremely high level of service to officers from 26 different police forces and the ambulance and fire services,” the spokesman said.
“Throughout the period of the riots, our enhanced monitoring of the network and continuous communication with the user community enabled us to provide an optimal service to those working on the front line.
“Naturally we are disappointed that the Police Federation did not think it appropriate to talk to Airwave or other police bodies responsible for communications prior to compiling their report.”
What the report failed to identify was that the rioters were using free-to-use BlackBerry Instant Messaging (BBM) which acted as a virtual message board as to where the action was moving to and developing.
Although many rioters have been identified via street CCTV, tried and sentenced, it seems that access to BBM data across the mobile networks has been more difficult to determine in order to acquire more solid evidence to assist apprehension. Subsequent analysis of those involved in the riots indicated a great majority of rioters had a previous criminal record, a high proportion were receiving state benefits and a high number were using BlackBerry mobiles. Is there a message in there?

The growing popularity of the smartphone is driving mobile data usage out of sight, although one has to wonder what people do on their phones all day. A new report by Ericsson says that mobile data traffic will increase ten-fold over the next five years and there will be five billion mobile broadband subscriptions by the end of 2016. In the current year alone subscriptions will hit 900 million and smartphone traffic will triple. In the oddest statistic from the report Ericsson claims that with more than 30 per cent of world’s population living in urban areas by the end of the forecast period, users occupying less than one per cent of the Earth’s land area will generate 60 per cent of the mobile traffic. If this is true one has to ask the question-can mobile networks in these dense urban areas cope with this volume of mobile traffic? Even with the new technologies such as LTE coming along will it be possible to deliver a good service to all the customers, particularly as Ericsson claims the huge increase in mobile data usage will be driven largely by demand for video content which is notoriously profligate in its use of bandwidth. Even with the massive investments operators are going to have to make over the next five years squeezing all this usage into the limited radio spectrum available will be a tough task. Makes you long for the dim and distant days when all people wanted to do was make phone calls and send the occasional SMS.

Gosh! Never done a blog before, wonder it the readers will enjoy my ramblings. As time progresses new and strange thoughts may emerge but hopefully they will stimulate responses from readers. Just for today let us muse upon the subject of LTE. For those who have been in the mobile business since mobile phones were the size of briefcases and weigned as much as a pile of bricks, the excitement over LTE has an overpowering sense of deja vu. One remembers GSM and more significantly the hype over 3G which lead to some many broken promises and broken dreams. There is something in the corporate mentality of the mobile industry which provokes it run after the next great idea before it has even completed the development and deployment of the last great idea-rather like a man courting a pretty girl who drops her when another prettier girl walks past. After a rocky start 3G is now the main technology of choice for operators and users and is now delivering on its promises. However many operators are still completing their 3G-and more significantly their HSPA upgrades, and are still hoping to monetize their massive investments. Just when a period of calm and consolidation is the order of the day along comes yet another pretty girl LTE with more promises of more bandwidth and higher data speeds. After the pretty girl comes her ugly sister in the form of government who despite her looks has something everyone wants-more spectum. Bring it on cry the operators we desperately need it to handle the flood of data we are currently handling! But at what price? Although no realistic government could expect to collar the amount of money they got for the 3G spectrum in the current global economic climate they will be looking to maximise the return on the new spectrum they are releasing. Well I know that mobile operators are seeing a river of money flowing through their coffers but how deep are their pockets in reality! Tears before bedtime?