Telecom Lead America: ST-Ericsson, a joint venture of
STMicroelectronics and Ericsson, posted 19 percent increase in second quarter
sales.
The significant growth in sales is primarily due to a
significant ramp of volumes of NovaThor platforms shipping to major customers.
Adjusted operating loss decreased sequentially by $62
million to $235 million, as the result of volume and margin improvements due to
new platforms and the first steps of the ongoing actions to reduce operating
expenses.
We ramped our NovaThor ModAp platform with Samsung and
Sony Mobile Communications and also added several new Chinese key players. We
are executing in a timely manner our new strategic plan to reposition our whole
business model and we finalized on July 1, as anticipated, the transfer of the
application processors development team to STMicroelectronics to build a world
class partnership,” said Didier Lamouche, president and CEO of ST-Ericsson.
We are advancing towards our objective to reduce our
breakeven point and to reach sustainable profitability. During the quarter, all
profit and loss metrics showed a sequential improvement: from revenue growth to
gross margin expansion and from expense reduction to the decrease of our
operating loss. While these indicators are encouraging, we recognize that
further improvements in the execution of our critical programs are needed.
Moreover, we operate in a very dynamic, fast-changing market and a highly
competitive environment. In this context our primary focus is on delivering
improvements of operating results and cash flow,” Lamouche added.
ST-Ericsson said Samsung continues to incorporate the
ST-Ericsson NovaThor ModAp
platforms into their
award-winning Samsung GALAXY smartphone line with the announcement of the
Samsung GALAXY Beam and Samsung GALAXY Ace 2.
China Unicom and Yulong are now customers of the NovaThor
platform. The NovaThor U8500 ModAp platform powers the new Coolpad Cheer
CP7728.
The Xperia go smartphone became the fourth phone this
year from Sony Mobile Communications to leverage the ST-Ericsson NovaThor
platform.
The Shanda Bambook smartphone – the first from the
China-based company – is powered by the ST-Ericsson NovaThor U8500 ModAp
solution. It is the first of several smartphones planned by Shanda to use the
ST-Ericsson NovaThor platform.
Two new Panasonic ELUGA devices for the Japanese market
are powered by the compact yet power efficient Thor M5780 thin modem.
A new Sharp AQUOS smartphone is based on the power
efficient ST-Ericsson Thor M5730 and available now in Japan.
