Author Archives: Scalper1

Apple Last Quarter Suffered First-Ever Decline In iPhone Sales

Apple ( AAPL ) iPhone sales to end users fell for the first time on a year-over-year basis in the fourth quarter, research firm Gartner ( IT ) said Thursday. The overall smartphone market saw sales to end users rise 9.7% worldwide to 403 million units in Q4. But iPhone sales declined 4.4% year over year to 71.5 million units, Gartner said. When Apple reported December-quarter results on Jan. 26, it said iPhone sales rose 0.4% to 74.78 million units. But Apple, among other vendors, counts iPhones sold into the sales channel, not those sold through to end customers. “Apple counts smartphone stock in retail inventory as ‘sold’ because Apple no longer owns it,” Gartner analyst Anshul Gupta told IBD via email. “Gartner does not consider this a sale to an end user and we use our own methodology to estimate sales to end users, based on Apple figures and other data.” Apple expects its own iPhone sales figures to fall on a year-over-year basis in the current quarter, Apple’s fiscal Q2 . Total industry smartphone sales to end users saw their slowest growth since 2008, Gartner said in a press release . In the fourth quarter, Samsung and Huawei were the only two top-five smartphone vendors to increase their sales to end users, Gupta said. South Korea-based Samsung continued to lead the industry, with sales to end users of 83.44 million smartphones in Q4, up 14.2% year over year. Its global smartphone market share rose to 20.7% last quarter from 19.9% a year earlier. Samsung makes smartphones based on the open-source Android operating system from Alphabet ‘s ( GOOGL ) Google. But Samsung’s share of the premium smartphone segment is eroding as more customers switch to iPhones, Gupta said. “For Samsung to stop its falling sales of premium smartphones, it needs to introduce new flagship smartphones that can compete with iPhones and stop the churn to iOS devices,” Gupta said.  Samsung is expected to unveil its latest flagship phone, the Galaxy S7 series, on Sunday ahead of the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain. Apple easily held on to second place with 17.7% market share, down from 20.4% a year earlier. China-based Huawei came in third place with 32.12 million smartphones sold, up 52.7% year over year. Its market share jumped to 8% in Q4 from 5.7% a year earlier. Rounding out the top five last quarter were China-based vendors Lenovo and Xiaomi with 5% and 4.5% market share, respectively, Gartner said. Gartner expects Chinese smartphone makers to continue to grab market share in 2016. “They are well positioned to capitalize on demand for midrange to lower-end smartphones in emerging markets as they aggressively expand outside China,” Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza said in a report ahead of Mobile World Congress . “Their cost advantage allows them to push affordable, but more sophisticated midtier offerings, while increasing their brand awareness.” In terms of smartphone market share by operating system, Google’s Android OS climbed to 80.7% share in Q4, up from 76% in Q4 2014. The 17.7% share for Apple’s iOS was No. 2 Microsoft ‘s ( MSFT ) Windows faded to 1.1% market share in Q4, compared with 2.8% a year earlier. BlackBerry ( BBRY ) evaporated to 0.2% market share, vs. 0.5% in Q4 2014. Image provided by Shutterstock . RELATED: Over Quarter Of U.S. iPhone Owners Still Use 4-Inch Handsets Apple iPhone Sales In China Fall Off Cliff In January .  

Tesla Partner Nvidia Delves Into AI With Facebook, Alibaba

Tesla ( TSLA ) partner Nvidia ( NVDA ) forged alliances during Q4 with Facebook ( FB ) and Chinese Internet major  Alibaba ( BABA ) for speedy artificial intelligence chips, Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said late Wednesday on the chipmaker’s earnings conference call. And tech giants Alphabet ( GOOGL ), Microsoft ( MSFT ) and IBM ( IBM ) also are eyeing AI, she said. The arena pits graphics processing units, made by Nvidia and others, against another type of chip called field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), to power the process. The trend — accelerated machine learning — is good news for GPU-maker Nvidia and Intel ( INTC ), which completed its acquisition of FPGA-maker Altera in December. Fostering AI requires breakneck speed in the data center. Nvidia stock rocketed as much as 12% Thursday, touching a six-week high near 31. Midday on the stock market today , Nvidia stock was up 9%, following Nvidia’s blowout Q4 earnings and its guidance leap. For its fiscal Q4 ended Jan. 31, Nvidia reported 35 cents earnings per share on a record $1.4 billion in sales, flat and up 12%, respectively, vs. the year-earlier quarter, and topping Wall Street expectations. Fiscal 2016 ended with $5.01 billion in sales and $1.08 EPS, up a respective 7% and 4%, to beat the consensus model of 29 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. Nvidia guided above the consensus to $1.26 billion in sales, plus or minus 2%, for the current quarter. That would be up 9.5% year over year, but down 10% sequentially — a measure Rosenblatt analyst Kinngai Chan, in a research note, called “prudent and appropriate.” Chan sees weak China and Asia gaming demand slugging Nvidia in the first half of fiscal 2017. But gaming was the bright spot for Nvidia’s Q4, where sales flew 25% year over year to $810 million. GPU sales, Nvidia’s bread and butter, rose 10% to $1.18 billion. Nvidia Vs. AMD Pretty Close In the second half of the year, Nvidia could outperform after releasing its newest GPU generation, Pascal, says Chan. “We do not foresee any meaningful market share shifts and continue to see a benign pricing environment,” Chan wrote. Likewise, Pacific Crest analyst Michael McConnell doesn’t expect any major shifts in share between Nvidia and GPU rival Advanced Micro Devices ( AMD ). Both are deeply entrenched in the gaming world — Facebook-owned Oculus recommends GPUs from either to power its upcoming Rift VR games. “We believe further stock outperformance this year will hinge on company progress with PC GPU total addressable market expansion (VR) … given our belief that GPU share gains vs. Advanced Micro Devices have likely peaked,” McConnell wrote in a research note. He has a sector weigh rating on Nvidia stock. Automotive and data center sales remain healthy growth drivers for Nvidia — up 68% and 10% year over year, respectively — but they only comprise about 13%-14% of total sales, McConnell wrote. Sales stemming from Tesla and Nvidia’s joint accelerator chips are included in the data center total. Nvidia CEO Jen Hsun-Huang sees that as a potential boom market. During Q4, Nvidia announced a hyperscale data center platform that accelerates machine learning (AI). He sees the move to AI as “a brand new computing model.” “There are so many problems that computer science has been trying to solve, which algorithmically are just impossible to solve,” he told analysts on Wednesday’s call. “Using an enormous amount of data to train a neural net … is a pretty exciting computation model.”

IBM Stock Jumps For Buying Truven Health At Twice Its 2012 Price

Cerner stock headed down Thursday morning and IBM ‘s jumped after the latter disclosed that it’s buying Truven Health Analytics for $2.6 billion, twice Truven’s sale price four years ago. Like Cerner ( CERN ), the largest pure-play health care software provider in the U.S., smaller Truven provides cloud-based health care data and analytics. Truven counts 8,500 clients, including federal and state agencies, private employers, health plans, hospitals, clinicians and life science companies. Cerner’s primary clientele is large hospitals, though it serves many others, too. IBM stock was up 5.5%, near 133, in morning trading in the stock market today . Following two bad days after guiding Q1 and 2016 below analyst estimates, Cerner was down another 2%, near 52, in morning trading Thursday, 31% off an all-time high set April 13. Smaller rivals Allscripts ( MDRX ) and Athenahealth ( ATHN ) were down 1% and 3%, respectively. Quality Systems ( QSII ) stock was up 1%. Oracle ( ORCL ), which also developers health care IT software, was down a fraction Thursday morning. This is IBM Watson Health’s fourth big health care IT purchase since IBM created that business last April, bringing total employment in the unit to about 5,000. That’s about a fourth of Cerner’s employment, after it acquired Siemens Health last February.  In October, IBM completed the $1 billion acquisition of Merge Healthcare, a clinical image processing and interoperability-systems specialist. Including Truven, IBM will have invested more than $4 billion to build Watson Health, a business that IBM says is “intended to help professionals improve health outcomes, control costs, and advance value-based care solutions.” Encouraged by lawmakers, software developers and mountains of new regulations, health care IT has been moving into a “value-based care” model that measures outcomes — and rewards hospitals and medical practices for good outcomes, while pushing doctors out of paper-based systems. Hospital IT budgets are expected to rise about 8% in 2016, up from 6% to 7% growth in 2015, though Cerner closed 2015 with 30% revenue growth, due largely to its Siemens acquisition. Based in Ann Arbor, Mich., Truven was sold by Thomson Reuters ( TRI ) in June 2012 to Veritas Capital for $1.25 billion. In the press release, Truven CEO Mike Boswood said the merger “will help catapult the industry forward to transform health care and to save and improve lives.”