analysts

KGI’s Mingchi Kuo, an analyst with a good predictive track-record, has forecast that the Moto X will do substantially better than forecast, while the new 1080P Nexus 7 will do significantly worse.

According to our survey, 2013F shipments of Moto X, to be announced August 1, should reach 5.5mn units, up 57% from the previous forecast of 3.5mn units, including 1.5mn units in 3Q13 and 4.0mn units in 4Q13.

Kuo cited a combination of supply chain sources, the positive response from U.S. operators and Google’s planned megaspend of half a billion dollars on marketing the handset as key factors for the boost in expected numbers …
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Samsung has released its estimated earnings for Q2 2013, with a full announcement scheduled for later this month. The company estimates profits of $8.33 billion (9.5 trillion won), up nearly $2 billion over Q1’s $6.4 billion profit.

Reuters reports, however that this number was less than the 10.16 trillion won South Korean Analysts were expecting, which they blame on slowed momentum in Samsung’s smartphone division.

“The slowdown in its handset business appears to be worse than expected and the disappointing result simply reindorses the market view that Samsung’s smartphone growth momentum is slowing,” said Lee Sei-chul, an analyst at Meritz Securities.

Samsung’s component division, however, showed solid growth in Q2.

“But it’s got the component side of the business, which is showing solid improvements, and new handset product lineups for the third quarter, so (overall) earnings are likely to grow again in the current quarter.”

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While we’re at it, check out the sharp decline of RIM’s once powerful BlackBerry platform.

It’s always a good idea to take whatever analysts are predicting with a healthy dose of skepticism. That said,  Needham’s Charlie Wolf cites IDC data that portrays Android as losing ground to iOS in America. Android, of course, is the country’s leading smartphone platform which in the first quarter grabbed a whopping 49.5 percent of the smartphone market while Apple’s iPhone had 29.5 percent. The momentum cannot continue forever so it’s little surprise then that Android controlled 52.4 percent of the market in the quarter-ago period. Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt calls this Android’s “first sequential loss ever in any region of the world”, quoting Wolf’s Monday note to clients:

In our opinion, this is just the beginning of Android’s share loss in the US. The migration of subscribers to the iPhone on the Verizon network should accelerate this fall when Apple coordinates the launch of iPhone 5 on the GSM and CDMA networks. The iPhone could also launch on the Sprint and T-Mobile networks.

It looks like ol’ Charlie’s trying to offload some AAPL shares. He argues that…
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