Investment Corner:
Bloomberg reports that Palm faced a net Q3 loss of $95M, or 89 cents a share, compared to $54.7M a year earlier. Revenue came in 71% down, at $90.6M, making it the seventh consecutive quarter of losses for Palm. The revenue drop "underscores in no uncertain terms the need for an immensely successful launch of the Pre", Jim Suava stated, an analyst for Citigroup. The forth quarter, ending in May, will be challenging and gross margins will again drop, Chief Financial Officer Douglas Jeffries said on a conference call.
Palm is coping with dwindling sales of its older models in anticipation of the new webOS Pre. "It appears the Pre launch will not be in the May quarter," predicts Tavis McCourt, analyst with Morgan Keegan & Co. ITExaminer reports that Palm has lost $640.7M since the beginning of the 2009 fiscal year. Regardless, the latest financial move by Palm that brought in almost $84M gave the company "enough headroom" to launch the Pre.
UPDATE: Palm CEO Ed Colligan responded to the financial reports, stating the Pre was still on target for the "second quarter."
Palm webOS:
CEO Ed Colligan envisions an entire product line built on webOS, ZDNET reports him stating yesterday. During a conference call, he promised a "roadmap of smartphones and an application ecosystem built on the company's new webOS. In short, webOS is bigger than just the Pre base, even though they stated in a recent webinar that there were no plans to license webOS to third parties. In addition, the software on the Palm Pre was being "polished up and certified from Sprint", with manufacturing already being ramped up.
Responding with optimism, Colligan said his company was well positioned to launch the new device on time, despite the Treo Pro being delayed several times before finally launched on March 15. Palm is working hard with developers to get applications ready at launch, and recently released Chapter 2 of the webOS developer's guide, part of a continuing effort to energize developers for the new platform.
Other Pre bits:
Palm Inc. has been busy on their twitter account, and recently solved the mystery of how to pronounce the plural of Palm Pre. PalmWebOS tried to solve the dilemma beforehand, but seemed to get stumped on every occasion:
- Pres? Nope… sounds like I’m trying to talk slick with Obama
- Pre’s? Grammatical train wreck
- Preeze? Alright this is ridiculous
Accoding to Palm, the correct "sanctioned" plural of Pre is.....Pre phones.
Palm has also been busy on the marketing trail; last week, Precentral reports that an unconfirmed Palm employee called into the Howard Stern show. The voice was speculated as Lynn Fox, head of Palm PR. The popular radio host said he was familiar with the device from CES 2009. When asked about release date and video recording, the answers were "first half of 09" and "no", respectively. Looks like it's a Palm employee after all.
While it doesn't provide anything new, it seems to be part of an ongoing marketing campaign to reach out to the public (in this case, men), and to stretch out their marketing budget. Previously, the Pre has had airtime among celebrities at the IFC Awards and on the late night show with Jimmy Fallon. The Colbert Report may be next to pitch the new device.
0 Comments