SanDisk Hurt By Weak Demand, Supply Glut

Flash-memory maker SanDisk Corp warned that tepid demand from mobile phone manufacturers and a glut in supply that has led to lower prices are putting a dent its revenue margins.

The maker of NAND chips — used as storage memory in smartphones and tablets — has recently seen demand taper with some of its key customers scaling back orders.

Smartphones and tablets have caused a boom in NAND production, but SanDisk’s customers have not all done equally well from the explosion in mobile gadgets.

“Anybody who is not a Samsung or an Apple is burning through some (mobile) handset inventory,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Doug Freedman said.

“Until we get the PC market, tablet market and handset market back buying, we’ll see an oversupply situation.”

SanDisk’s weak outlook mirrors warnings from rival flash-memory makers, who have also blamed weak prices and demand for their disappointing results.

Late last month, Micron Technology said it was facing persistently low prices for memory chips and posted a wider loss. Toshiba Corp, Japan’s biggest chip maker, also posted a drop in quarterly sales at its electronics devices business, which includes semiconductors, hit by lower prices for memory chips.

SanDisk in January expressed concerns about weaker demand weighing on sales in the first half of this year and forecast lower-than-expected revenue for the first quarter.

The Milpitas, California-based company, which is set to report results later this month, said its gross margins for the January-March quarter will come in below its prior expectations of 39-42 percent, hurt by lower prices for its chips.

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Microsoft Seizes Botnet Servers

Microsoft Corp scored a win in efforts to fight online banking fraud, saying it had seized several servers used to steal login names and passwords, disrupting some of the world’s most sophisticated cybercrime rings.

The software giant said on Monday that its cybercrime investigation group also took legal and technical actions to fight notorious criminals who infect computers with a prevalent malicious software known as Zeus.

By recruiting computers into networks called botnets, Zeus logs the online activity of infected machines, providing criminals with credentials to access financial accounts.

“We’ve disrupted a critical source of money-making for digital fraudsters and cyber thieves, while gaining important information to help identify those responsible and better protect victims,” said Richard Boscovich, senior attorney for the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, which handled the investigation in collaboration with the financial industry.

Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit is worldwide team of investigators, lawyers, analysts and other specialists who fight cybercrime. A year ago they helped U.S. authorities take down a botnet known as Rustock that had been one of the biggest producers of spam e-mail. Some security experts estimated that in its heyday Rustock was responsible for half the spam in junk email bins.

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Corporate America Prefers iPads

Corporate customers who are planning tablet purchases next quarter overwhelmingly picked Apple’s iPad, a research firm said Tuesday.

Of the 1,000 business IT buyers surveyed last month by ChangeWave Research who said they would purchase tablets for their firms in the coming quarter, 84% named the iPad as an intended selection.

That number was more than ten times the nearest competitor and was a record for Apple.

“The percentage reporting they’ll buy Apple iPads has jumped to the highest level of corporate iPad demand ever seen in a ChangeWave survey,” the company said in a blog post.

Apple’s share of future business purchases has never been lower than 77% in any ChangeWave survey, which go back to November 2010.

Just over a fifth of all IT buyers — 22% — confirmed that they would be purchasing tablets for employees in the April-June quarter, ChangeWave said.

While Apple’s stock among corporate buyers rose by seven percentage points from the 77% that tapped the iPad as their preferred device last November, all other tablet makers’ numbers dropped in the most recent survey.
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Is Twitter Selling Your Tweets?

Twitter users are about to become major marketing meat, as two research companies prepare to release information to clients who will pay for the rights to mine that data.

Boulder, Colorado-based Gnip Inc and DataSift Inc, based in the U.K. and San Francisco, are licensed by Twitter to analyze archived tweets and basic information about users, like geographic location. DataSift announced this week that it will release Twitter data in packages that will encompass the last two years of activity for its customers to mine, while Gnip can go back only 30 days.

“Harvesting what someone said a year or more ago is game-changing,” said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. As details emerge on the kind of information being mined, he and other privacy rights experts are concerned about the implications of user information being released to businesses waiting to pore through it with a fine-tooth comb.

“As we see Twitter grow and social media evolve, this will become a bigger and bigger issue,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for British-based Internet security company Sophos Ltd. “Online companies know which websites we click on, which adverts catch our eye, and what we buy … increasingly, they’re also learning what we’re thinking. And that’s quite a spooky thought.”

Twitter opted not to comment on the sale and deferred questions to DataSift. In 2010, Twitter agreed to share all of its tweets with the U.S. Library of Congress. Details of how that information will be shared publicly are still in development, but there are some stated restrictions, including a six-month delay and a prohibition against using the information for commercial purposes.

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Nokia To Unveil Cheaper Windows Phone

Nokia debuted a new, cheaper and more budget-friendly smartphone using Microsoft’s Windows Phone software, targeting a wider market for its new range of smartphones.

Cheaper phones are the key for Nokia and Microsoft in their battle to win a larger share of the market, analysts say.

In addition to the new Lumia 610 Nokia will also unveil at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona a global version of its high-end Lumia 900 phone, which AT&T is scheduled to roll out in the United States, the sources said.

Nokia is set to unveil the phones at a news conference next Monday, on February 27.

Nokia last year dumped its own smartphone software platforms in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone, which has so far had a limited impact due to the high prices of phones using it.

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New Chip To Cut Cost Of LTE Smartphones

Chip manufacturer Renesas Mobile has unveiled the MP5232, a processor that will allow vendors to build LTE (Long Term Evolution)smartphones with a price tag between $150 and $300, the company said Wednesday.

The big advantage of the 1.5GHz dual-core processor is that it is a single-chip product that can do both 3G and LTE, eliminating the need to use separate chipsets for the two technologies. A more integrated device results in a cheaper product that takes up less space and uses less power, according to Malik Saadi, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms and Media.

The cost is important, because for LTE to take off, there is a need for smartphones that cost less than current products, according to Renesas.

In addition to smartphones, the MP5232 can also be used to power tablets, said Renesas.

One of the challenges of developing chipsets for LTE is the plethora of frequencies used. Renesas hasn’t specified which bands the MP5232 can handle, but says it is designed to support all major operators and their respective requirements.

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Hacked Companies Still Not Alerting Investors

At least a half-dozen major U.S. companies whose computer networks have been breached by cyber criminals or international spies have not admitted to the incidents despite new guidance from securities regulators urging such disclosures.

Top U.S. cybersecurity officials believe corporate hacking is widespread, and the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a lengthy “guidance” document on October 13 outlining how and when publicly traded companies should report hacking incidents and cybersecurity risk.

But with one full quarter having elapsed since the SEC request, some major companies that are known to have had significant digital security breaches have said nothing about the incidents in their regulatory filings.

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp, for example, said last May that it had fended off a “significant and tenacious” cyber attack on its networks. But Lockheed’s most recent 10-Q quarterly filing, like its filing for the period that included the attack, does not even list hacking as a generic risk, let alone state that it has been targeted.

A Reuters review of more than 2,000 filings since the SEC guidance found some companies, including Internet infrastructure company VeriSign Inc and credit card and debit card transaction processor VeriFone Systems Inc, revealed significant new information about hacking incidents.

Yet the vast majority of companies addressing the issue only used new boilerplate language to describe a general risk. Some hacking victims did not even do that.

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Is Samsung Flip Flopping?

Samsung is apparently rethinking its decision not to bring Android 4 to the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab.

Earlier the company stated that neither device could be updated due to the size of Samsung’s TouchWiz interface. The news created a bit of an issue with users sharpening scythes, pitchforks and lighting torches to go on a lynching. Now word on the street is that the company is considering backing down on its decision due to “strong customer demand.”

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Does Yahoo Have a Buyer?

Blackstone Group and Bain Capital are putting together a bid for all of Yahoo Inc with Asian partners in a deal that could value the Internet company at about $25 billion, a source familiar with the discussions said on Wednesday.

The potential bid by the group, which would include China’s Alibaba Group and Japan’s Softbank Corp, has not yet been finalized, the source and two other people familiar with the matter said.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, whose primary interest is in buying back a 40 percent stake owned by Yahoo, is keeping its options open and said it has not decided whether to participate in a bid for all of Yahoo.

“Alibaba Group has not made a decision to be part of a whole company bid for Yahoo,” Alibaba Group spokesman, John Spelich, said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.

Yahoo’s shares, which closed at $15.71 on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, gained 6.4 percent to $16.72 in after-hours trading, valuing the company at more than $20 billion.

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HP Makes Changes At The Top

HP has appointed former Boeing Company executive John Hinshaw as CIO.

In the newly created role of EVP of Global Technology and Business Processes, Hinshaw will oversee IT and shared and administrative services, including indirect and services procurement. Hinshaw also will be in charge of optimising business processes across the company.

Hinshaw was previously VP and general manager of Boeing Information Solutions at The Boeing Company, where he was responsible for running a new business.

Prior to Boeing, Hinshaw was SVP and CIO at Verizon Wireless. Earlier in his career he also served as a consultant with Accenture.

Hinshaw will join HP as a member of its executive council on 15 November, reporting to HP president and CEO Meg Whitman.

Meanwhile, HP also announced that Craig Flower has been promoted to SVP and CIO. Flower will be responsible for data management, application architecture, global business intelligence, sales, and product development and engineering applications. Flower has held a wide range of IT management positions within HP since 1984.

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