UPDATE - Samsung new phone to use Qualcomm chip
Wednesday November 20, 2:16 pm ET By Lucas van Grinsven
(Adds detail, quotes)
PARIS, Nov 20 (Reuters) - South Korea's Samsung Electronics (KSE:05930.KS - News) said on Wednesday it will debut with a third generation mobile phone on the European market in the third quarter of 2003, using a Qualcomm (NasdaqNM:QCOM - News) chip that was announced last week.
The world's fastest growing mobile phone maker, with a ten percent market share trailing behind Nokia (NOK1V.HE) and Motorola (NYSE:MOT - News), also said it expected moderate growth in the global cellphone market to 435 million units in 2003 from some 410 million units this year.
"It will be modest growth. Next year global demand will be 435 million units," Senior Vice President of Samsung's telecommunications division, Park Sang-Jin, told Reuters in an interview.
He reiterated Samsung would continue to gain market share, although he declined to give a forecast, saying India and China would be the fast growing markets next year. It would cater to these markets by launching lower-end phones rather than its usual mid- and high-end models.
"We're going to have phones for those markets which would be considered mass market models in the West," he said.
Thanks to its high-end product mix, Samsung has the fattest profit margin in the handset industry, rivaling even Nokia's 22 percent with a 26.8 percent operating margin.
The flat TVs to semiconductor company, on the sidelines of a product roadshow, also shed light on its launch plans of a future series of smartphones based on software from three different vendors: U.S.-based Palm (NasdaqNM:PALM - News) and Microsoft (NasdaqNM:MSFT - News), and Britain's Symbian.
Showing prototypes of Microsoft and Palm phones, Park told Reuters his company will take the Microsoft smartphone in production by the third quarter of next year.
"Most demand (for the Microsoft smartphone) will come from the North American market," he said, adding the phone that can download video clips, handle email and instant messaging, would be benefiting from the recently upgraded fast wireless CDMA2000 1x networks in the American markets.
EUROPE LAGGING
He played down the potential for smartphones in the European market where the upgraded GSM voice networks to faster data-enabled GPRS networks were still not fast enough to use data-intensive functions like streaming music.
He expected the move in Europe to faster Wideband CDMA networks, the next step up from GPRS and known as third generation, would be slow.
Samsung would still launch a W-CDMA handset in Europe, because it needed an almost identical phone in its Korean home market where two different kinds of third generation networks will be used.
"The W-CDMA phone we're going to introduce by the third quarter of next year, with the Qualcomm chip" that will be able to handle almost all available second and third generation wireless networks, he said.
He warned that the high cost of the chip and the slow roll-out of W-CDMA in Europe and elsewhere would not make it a big seller. So far only Japan's NEC (Tokyo:6701.T - News) has a W-CDMA phone for the European market, while Nokia and Motorola have announced W-CDMA handsets for next year.
European telecoms carriers have slowed investments in third generation networks to boost their battered balance sheets, hurt by a 100 billion euro bill for third generation radio spectrum licenses in 2000.
"European carriers have been penalised by the license auctions," Park said, adding that U.S. and Asian markets were overtaking Europe in wireless services.
Park also said that it would not make a phone using software from the other main provider, Symbian, before the fourth quarter of 2003. "It could be 2004," he said.
Symbian, co-owned by most of the major handset makers, has deals with all top five cellphone producers. Samsung is the only top five player which has also signed a deal with rival Microsoft.
biz.yahoo.com
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It appears Samsung has the inside poop on ASIC delivery dates...
"..it needed an almost identical phone in its Korean home market where two different kinds of third generation networks will be used..."
LOL!
Samsung won't need but a few token handsets in Korea to mollify screwed small vendors, and MIC politicos holding the bag, for display trial(s) for Europe...
And, of course, for Korean carriers to roam on all of the commercial European wCDMA networks.
LOL!
Hide and seek!
Can you find the rational business case for slower, buggy, application-starved, expensive wCDMA in Korea?
Perhaps it's hiding under the bed. |
