HTC CEO Cher Wang during an investor meeting yesterday apologized for the company’s poor performance in recent months. According to the Taipei Times she attributed it to “poor operational efficiency and overly conservative marketing strategy amid fierce competition in the global market.”
After just over a year and a half since leaving TechCrunch full-time and launching CrunchFund as a partner, prominent tech columnist and investor MG Siegler announced today that he is joining the muscle investment group that is Google Venture as a general partner.
David Lawee, Google’s mergers and acquisitions chief, recently attended a GarageGeeks event at a rusty garage in a Tel Aviv Jaffa port to meet with Israeli startup owners seeking cash for ventures.
GarargeGeeks is an “Israeli based not-profit physical and virtual space for innovative and creative people to introduce, network, expose, create, brainstorm, innovate and build,” according to its website. “People that take part in the activities come from different disciplines such as electronics, software, mechanical, art, design, music, hacking and gaming.”
The organization essentially holds monthly events to promote building non-commercial projects and introduce local businesses to multinationals while located in Israel’s Holon Industrial Zone. The event’s garage is a 100-square meter space with machinery tools, electronic components, software developments and raw project materials.
“I’ve met about 100 Israeli companies in two days and that’s, like, super-efficient,” said Lawee to Bloomberg between corporate conversations at the speed-dating-style event. “When you make a connection with an entrepreneur who’s really excited, whether you do a deal with him or not, that’s kind of the juice of the job.”
Two weeks later, Google initiated a funding program for Israeli entrepreneurs as part of a recent acceleration in United States’ technology companies backing startups in late 2011.
Samsung today posted a 26-percent drop in Q2 profits because its television and semiconductor operations are shrinking. Profits fell to 3.7 trillion won, or about $3.5 billion, versus 5.01 trillion in the year-ago quarter. The drop is being blamed on Samsung’s flat panel unit which is bleeding money for a second consecutive quarter now. Because demand for 3D TVs and consumer electronics in general is weakening, Samsung’s flat panel division has generated an operating loss of 73.5 billion won ($69.1 million) in the second quarter, Bloomberg explains. Just a year ago, the same unit profited 880 billion won (about $827 million). Slim margins and low prices in the cut-throat television business don’t help either. A Kiwoom Securities Co. analyst Kim Sung In slammed the company:
Only the phone business is holding up. Everything else is looking bad. There’s no bright picture for the company looking ahead.
Maybe the flat panel division will recover if Apple brings out an intelligent, networked television set in 2012 using flat panels from Samsung? It’s all peachy for their mobile devices unit which has benefited from strong smartphone and tablet sales. A recent comScore survey put Samsung as the #1 smartphone brand in the US that accounted for 24.8 percent share of all mobile phone subscribers aged 13 and up. What about other metrics?
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Some interesting Larry Page quotes coming out of Google’s annual shareholder meeting from yesterday afternoon, courtesy of a Cowen and Company analyst Jim Friedland. Page is adamant to prevent his company from losing focus due to a Soviet-like bureaucracy which destroyed Nokia. The new CEO is going to re-create the startup culture at Google and ensure that the vast majority of resources are poured into search and advertising.
“We’re not betting the farm on speculative technology projects”, he said, adding there was still “a tremendous opportunity” in increasing ad relevance. Page told Wall Street analysts and shareholders that Google is committed to making money from free products, specifically citing Android as an example. He then switched into the “Moon shots” talk:
Our goal is to aim high to achieve important things to continue to grow this company.
So, at Google the Sun is still revolving around search, search, search (and ads, ads, ads). In that respect, Android is increasingly looking like the biggest growth opportunity in the long run…
