Carolina Milanesi

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Carolina Milanesi
Research VP
10 years at Gartner
11 years IT industry

Carolina Milanesi is a Research VP in Gartner's Mobile Devices team and agenda manager for mobile devices. Ms. Milanesi leads the research for mobile devices worldwide and is responsible for the forecasting and market share effort in this area. Other areas of coverage are mobile…Read Full Bio

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2Q10 Earnings season comes to an end. One main theme: margins pressure

by Carolina Milanesi  |  July 30, 2010  |  2 Comments

The 2Q10 earnings season is drawing to an end with Samsung, LG and Motorola all announcing in the past 24 hours. My preliminary estimates came in pretty close to the vendors’ volumes. I think however, that this is not going to be the main story going forward and that looking at ASP this quarter will show a very interesting but worrying trend for vendors.

Most vendors have cited strong competition as well as a stronger Dollar as the main causes of ASP decrease in the quarter. Unfortunately, they have also guided to increased price pressure in the second half of the year. Although this is bad for manufacturers it is of course great news for consumers, who will be able to get their hands on devices with improved specifications without having to invest much more money than they did when they last bought a phone. With increased consumer confidence in many emerging markets, consumers are potentially planning to spend more money but if things continue as they are they will not need to do so.

The phone market is turning more and more into the PC market where for the same money you get more features and where manufacturers will struggle to differentiate their offering. Some, including me, thought that apps and services would help vendors add value to hardware. It seems to me though, that the popularity of Android is not going to allow that to happen as so many vendors are using the same platform. Are open single-vendor platforms (RIM, Apple) the only way to keep your margins healthy? If so, should Nokia just forget about Symbian Foundation and bring it in-house? It is not like there are vendors queuing up to bring Symbian devices to market. And it might allow Nokia to move more swiftly going forward.

Our 2Q10 market share will be published on August 11 and a press release will go out the day after that.

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2 responses so far ↓

  • 1 rca ieftin   August 1, 2010 at 3:09 am

    I think Nokia is on track but need to hurry. An association with a giant of the online world would be welcomed. I think the only way you can survive on the market. In the future will be using phones altogether. they become mini computers. From rca ieftin

  • 2 Carolina Milanesi   August 6, 2010 at 7:20 pm

    Thanks for the post. Are you suggesting an internet company should buy Nokia?