Communicasia, the south east Asian telecoms and broadcasting tradeshow, showed how operators in Asia have a pragmatic view on the telecommunications markets. Unlike many in Western markets, there is a much more sober approach to building a service platform in the residential and consumer market, particularly in south east Asia. These operators typically get less exposure in the industry mainly due to much smaller PR departments than their Western counter-parties. Read more

Microsoft made a slew of announcements at the E3 gaming conference yesterday, most notably in our view is the integration with social networking sites with the Xbox 360 gaming experience. From this Fall, Xbox Gold gamers (paid for network service) will be able to access Twitter and Facebook from the game console. For example, some games will be capable of uploading screen shots to Facebook (using Facebook Connect), and Twitter statuses can be updated from games too. Xbox Live can also access Facebook and Twitter services.

We dedicated a report on this subject, which we released to clients on December 2, 2008, on how gaming will be part of an online social profile. We argued in particular that game console vendors should integrate their games and platforms with third party social networking sites. As the report amongst other points out: Read more

With the release of the Ovi application store, Nokia takes the first step towards becoming a power house in software and services. Ovi enables application developers to release, on a single platform, applications for Symbian-based handsets. Due to differences in Symbian OS platforms, the applications will need to be developed for specific OS versions.

Many have jumped to the conclusion of comparing Ovi with the Apple application store. We suspect that Nokia has much more planned for Ovi than being just a me-too service. Read more

Sony today full year results for FY2009, and reported revenue of yen 7,730 billion (down 12.9% in the year). This sharp decline in revenue is attributed to weakening of the consumer market and due to a strong local currency. Still, it is not common in the technology industry that we see such strong downturns in the top line figures. Operating loss amounted to yen 227.8 billion (down from an operating income of 475.3 a year ago). Given the overall weakness in the results, Sony delivered a net loss of yen 98.9 billion for the year, which is down from a net income of yen 369.4 billion in 2008.

The Japanese industry is in a tough position. The yen is very strong, while the Korean won is weak. This gives the Korean electronics industry a competitive advantage in export markets over the Japanese companies as their profit margins increase due to favourable exchange rates. As we commented in Samsung's latest results, this is what is called "bugger thy neighbour". Wealth within a country is created by keeping its own currency low so that imports are made more expensive while exports are made cheaper. Read more