Although neither company has confirmed or denied the report, Manager-Magazin.de is writing that Sony is planning to buyout Ericsson’s 50 percent stake of the Sony Ericsson mobile manufacturing joint venture.
Sony is currently talking to banks that will help finance the buyout and the rumor has been flying for months that Ericsson is willing to sell its stake in the venture.
The company was created as a way to “bring Ericsson’s mobile experience and Sony’s consumer electronics experience together for a successful line of cell phones.” The company had been decently successful with its line of Walkman phones but recently announced Q4 2008 loss of $187 million EUR with more losses expected if the global recession continues.
Danske Bank of Denmark believes any deal made would cost Sony very little cash and could actually lose Ericsson money.
Result for: q4
In March, Pioneer announced it was halting Plasma display production and today Vizio has made a similar announcement, putting another nail in the technology’s coffin.
The inexpensive HDTV maker has decided to move its focus to LCD sets, and will completely halt its plasma production by the end of the year.
With Vizio and Pioneer bowing out, three major manufacturers remain in the plasma business: LG, Panasonic, and Samsung.
Plasma TV shipments rose 28 percent for the Q4 2008 and were up over 10 percent for the entire year. Despite those statistics, LCD TVs control the market, selling about seven times the amount of plasma sets over a full year.
Result for: q4
The past year has been very eventful for Blu-ray. Many new Blu-ray products have been shown at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this year, where just a year ago Blu-ray jumped ahead of its former rival dvd.cfm” target=”_blank”>HD DVD. “It turned out to be a phenomenal year for Blu-ray,” said Tom Adams of Adams Media Research. In the fourth quarter of 2008, which is only too important for tech companies, U.S. consumers bought up 28.6 million Blu-ray titles.
In the same period of 2007, U.S. consumers bought about 9.5 million titles. The biggest selling Blu-ray title, of course, was 2008’s box office heavyweight “The Dark Knight”, which was also the first Blu-ray title to sell over 1 million copies, according to the Blu-ray Disc Association.
BDA President, Andy Parsons, looks back at the beginning of the DVD-era to prove strength in Blu-ray, claiming a faster adoption rate than DVD, and CD. He counts 10.7 million Blu-ray players sold in the United States by the end of 2008, about two and half years since they first became available. By comparison, three years after DVD was launched, there were 5.4 million DVD players in consumers homes.
Critics of these statistics might point out that of the 10.7 million Blu-ray players counted, over 6 million are PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles, which arguably are sold moreso for gaming than Blu-ray. However, while this point could force player sales to become more evenly matched with early DVD player sales, rising Blu-ray disc sales may indicate growing interest in Blu-ray amongst PS3 owners who previously were not interested or aware of the Blu-ray functionality.
[More]>>
