Daily deals company LivingSocial continues to face challenges in the market. In the last quarter it posted sales of $135 million, up 23% on a year ago, but it also swung to a net loss of $50 million, from net income of $156 million in Q1 2012. The numbers were revealed in a 10-Q filing from one of its key investors, Amazon, in line with its Q1 earnings reported on Thursday.

The filing also shows that Amazon was the majority investor in the $110 million round earlier this year. Amazon put in $56 million of that sum.

“Additionally, in Q1 2013 we made a $56 million investment in LivingSocial that we have recorded as a cost method investment,” it notes.

LivingSocial’s operating loss, meanwhile, was down to about half the size of last year, at $44 million. The Washington Business Journal cites a source that notes that LivingSocial has reduced its operating cash burn to single-digit millions to continue that trend. The company has been making an effort to cut expenses; in November it laid of 10% of its staff, equivalent to about 400 people.

E-commerce giant Amazon has a 29% equity stake in the company, it noted in the SEC filing. It also writes in the 10-Q that the book value of its equity-method investment was $36 million at the end of March. The losses at LivingSocial had a $17 million negative impact on Amazon.

Overall, Amazon saw revenues of $16 billion, falling just short of analyst expectations of $16.2 billion, with a bleak outlook for the quarter ahead, with its aggressive, thin-margin strategy leading it to an operating loss of up to $340 million. Right now, its stock is trading nearly 7% down.

The market for daily deals sites is less than healthy right now. Rival Groupon in February also reported a worse-than-expected loss and then lost its founder and CEO Andrew Mason in the wake of the news, and now it’s working on a pivot to become more of a multi-purpose local commerce player.

LivingSocial, which has been around since 2007, has raised an eye-watering $918 million in the last six years — and what that much sunk into the company, you can see why existing investors are key to keep it from falling over. CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy noted in February that its most recent $110 million round of fundraising was indeed a “down round”, valuing the company at around $1.5 billion, lower than in its last fundraise. But it was not an emergency debt infusion, he maintained: at least some of the investors took equity in the company as part of the deal.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Groupon has just put out its Q4 and full-year results. It has reported quarterly revenue of $638.8 million with an operating loss of $12.9 million and a loss per per share of 12 cents, falling short of analyst expectations on the EPS front — they had predicted $638.41 million in revenue and EPS of $0.03.

Those numbers show 30 percent revenue growth and a slightly smaller ($12.9 million versus $15 million) operating loss compared to the same period last year. (Those Q4 results needed to be restated about a month after reporting because Groupon had higher-than-expected refunds, due to selling more expensive products and having customers make more returns of those goods.)

As of 4:31pm Eastern, Groupon shares had fallen 22.44 percent (to $4.64) in after-hours trading.

The earnings release emphasizes gross billings, which grew 24 percent year-over-year to $1.52 billion.

“Record billings growth this quarter is a clear signal that customers love Groupons,” CEO Andrew Mason said in the release. “We will continue to invest in growth through 2013 as we see new opportunities to give our customers what they want.”

For the year as a whole, Groupon is reporting revenue of $2.33 billion (up 35 percent) and operating income of $98.7 million (compared to a loss of $233.4 million in 2011).

There were some bright spots for the company this past quarter due to holiday season shopping, particularly in the area of mobile commerce, one of the services that it wants to expand as part of its plan to expand beyond daily deals to provide more services to local businesses. It noted that Black Friday mobile transactions were up 140% year on year, with four times as many mobile purchases as on a normal Friday morning; mobile drove over 40% of Groupon’s overall transactions during that period as well as over half of Groupon Goods’ transactions. The earnings release says that that nearly 40 percent of transactions were completed on mobile in January, up 44 percent from the previous year.

Focusing on international, Groupon reported gross billings of $802 million (up 6.2 percent) and revenue of $263 million (down 15.9 percent) Groupon’s international business, which covers 47 countries outside of the U.S., with the U.K. the biggest market, is still based around the company’s legacy business of daily deals largely because Groupon’s growth has been inorganic and acquisition-based, and so each country has its own back-end system and has therefore been a challenge to integrate into what the U.S. is doing. It’s about a year behind but apparently integration of some of the mobile commerce services is on the agenda, so we may see services like Breadcrumb point of sale solution coming to international waters soon.

The results are coming in ahead of a Groupon board meeting tomorrow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sprint Nextel, the third-ranking U.S. wireless carrier, has just announced earnings results for Q4 2012, reporting a net loss of $1.3 billion, and a negative EPS of $.44. That’s compared to a net loss of $1.3B and a diluted net loss of $.43 per share in the same quarter last year.

The company says that “$45 million or negative $.01 per share (pre-tax) was related to impacts from Hurricane Sandy.”

Analysts expected a negative EPS of $.37 on the quarter on revenues of $8.9 billion.

Wireless service revenues were $7 billion, while overall revenues were $9 billion compared to last year’s $8.72 billion.That comes out to an operating loss of $758 million.

In terms of device sales, Sprint sold 2.2 million iPhones in the period ending December 30, 38 percent of which went into the hands of new postpaid customers. Sprint has also sold more than 4 million 4G LTE smartphones as a part of its network upgrade.

That’s up from last quarter’s 1.5 million iPhones sold, which has been the flat figure from Sprint for the past three quarters.

This is likely due the holiday rush, which has contributed to net additions of 401,000 for the company’s post-paid subscriber base.

As a point of comparison, Verizon sold 6.2 million iPhones over roughly the same period, while AT&T sold 8.6 million. Clearly, even a slight jump for Sprint doesn’t quite match that of its competitors.

Sprint’s rollout of its 4G LTE network began in July of last year and has since grown to cover 58 different markets. This network upgrade is crucial to Sprint’s future success as AT&T and Verizon’s high-speed networks are already developed and operational on a nationwide scale.

Though the company is still struggling, an acquisition by Japan’s Softbank Corp should help with a boost for Sprint. The deal closed for $20.1 billion in exchange for 70 percent of the fully-diluted shares of Sprint stock.

Thanks to the added security of this deal, Sprint recently made a bid to buy out the remaining shares of Clearwire that it doesn’t already own for $2.97/share. However, Dish seems to have made a higher bid of $3.30/share, which could be detrimental to Sprint which licenses Clearwire’s network.

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You know times are tough when you have to sell the HQ and rent it back to raise a little capital. Well that’s exactly what the once mighty mobile maker, Nokia, is doing. The company has just announced that it intends to sell its Espoo, Finland, headquarters to Finland-based Exilion, and rent it back on a long term lease. The selling price is €170 million.

Nokia said it expects the sale to be completed by the end of the year.

“We had a comprehensive sales process with both Finnish and foreign investors and we are very pleased with this outcome. As we have said before, owning real estate is not part of Nokia’s core business and when good opportunities arise we are willing to exit these types of non-core assets. We are naturally continuing to operate in our head office building on a long-term basis,” said Timo Ihamuotila, CFO, Nokia in a statement.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Nintendo has stemmed operating loss slightly in the April-September quarter, the total falling from $718 million to $366 million. Console sales fell about 60 percent with DS sales of 970,000 and Wii sales hitting 1.32 million.

The 3DS rose nearly 65%, however, with sales of 5 million units, including 2.1 million 3DS XLs.

Nintendo noted that a number of titles, including New Super Mario Bros. 2 and Mario Kart 7, buoyed 3DS revenue considerably. Nintendo and its partners sold 19.03 million games for the 3DS, which suggests a great deal of interest and support in the platform.

You can read the complete earnings report here. The stock closed at 16.14 today.

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Google’s Q3 earnings leaked today, and among the reported stats was a noteworthy gap in full-time employees between its Q2 and Q3 results. At the end of June, Google had 54,604 full-time employees, thanks to a massive influx of 20,293 new Motorola Mobility staff. As of September 30, the company reports employing 53,546 people full-time, a difference of 1,058 jobs.

The cuts came entirely out of the Motorola side of the business, as total employee numbers there slid from 20,293 to 17,428 between Q2 and Q3, a difference of 2,865. Employees of Google proper actually increased, from 34,311 to 36,118 between the two accounting periods. While some of those new additions could just be reassignments from the Motorola division, there’s likely a lot of new hires involved in that number, too, which means Motorola Mobility overall took a considerable staffing hit, even given the assumption that some Motorola Mobility employees may have voluntary left the search giant post-acquisition.

Google’s stock is suffering from the early reveal of the results and missed Wall Street analyst targets, but Motorola’s contribution was on operating loss which had a considerable effect on the overall results.

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Google’s Q3 earnings just leaked ahead of schedule, and it appears that Motorola revenues accounted for $2.58 billion of Google’s $14.10B revenue in the three-month period ending September 30. $1.78 billion was generated from the mobile segment alone, with $797 million credited to the home segment. In total, Motorola revenues account for 18 percent of Google’s Q3 report.

Last quarter, Motorola brought in a comfy $1.25 billion for Google, and yet still Motorola grows to now account for 18 percent of Google’s revenue as opposed to last quarter’s 10 percent.

Still, Motorola is accounting for major losses within Google as well, reporting a GAAP operating loss of $527 million ($505 million of which came from mobile), a 20 percent decrease in revenues.

Google acquired Motorola for $12.5 billion inAugust. Slowly but surely, Google has been engulfing Motorola whole, replacing longtime CEO Sanjay Jah with Googler Dennis Woodside, and even having Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt on stage to launch some new phones.

In fact, two of those phones went on sale today with a big splash from Verizon.

But according to the report Google has offset the hire of 1,807 Googlers with the layoffs of 2,865 jobs at Motorola in the third quarter alone. Motorola’s headcount is down from 54,604 at the end of June to 53,546 today.

Despite Motorola’s growth within Google, the company actually missed in earnings today reporting revenue up 45 percent to $14.10 billion, and a 20 percent decrease in net income to $2.1 billion. As a result Google stock tanked 10 percent before trading halted.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Nokia today confirmed the close of its last Finnish handset factory in Salo, Finland, with talks coming to a close regarding the number of jobs to be cut. In Salo, 780 people will lose their jobs. It was originally speculated that Nokia’s Salo shut-down would result in 850 layoffs.

No longer can the once-king of mobile proudly claim the words “Made in Finland.” This final phone was assembled on Wednesday.

This isn’t unexpected — Nokia informed us in June that it had plans to cut 3,700 jobs in Finland as a cost-cutting measure. And the firm went even farther, stating the overall goal is cut 10,000 jobs globally.

The plant will close officially in September 2012.

Nokia is doing everything it can to stay afloat after posting losses for the past few quarters, almost doubling its operating loss in Q2, June.

The company has said that this plan, the shuttering of research and development centers in Germany and Canada, along with the plant in Salo (and all the accompanying job reductions), should save nearly $2 billion by the end of next year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Online video platform providers Brightcove released its second quarter earnings report today, posting a net loss of $4.3 million, or $0.16 per diluted share, compared to $6.9 million last in Q2 2011. Revenues for the quarter increased 41 percent to $21.6 million over last year’s second quarter, when it had $15.3 million in sales.

It also announced that it has agreed to acquire cloud encoding vendor Zencoder, creator of the popular Video.js HTML5 video player. Zencoder has more than 1,000 paying customers for its encoding services, including PBS, Scripps Networks Interactive, IGN, SmugMug, Yammer, TwitVid, College Humor, Funny or Die, and others. The open source Video.js player is used on more than 24,000 websites.

Brightcove is paying $30 million for Y Combinator alum Zencoder, and plans to continue to operate the company separate from its core business. Founded in 2010, Zencoder raised just $2 million, mostly through a Series A round raised in April 2011.

While Brightcove posted a net loss, key metrics actually improved from last year. Its gross profit for the second quarter was $15.2 million, compared to $10.3 million in Q2 2011. Non-GAAP loss from operations was $3.9 million for the second quarter of 2012, narrowing from $5.1 million during the second quarter of 2011. Brightcove also announced that it had 4,697 customers at the end of the quarter, up 43 percent compared to the same period last year.

Brightcove raised $54.6 million through its IPO earlier this year. As a result, it now has $58.6 million in cash and cash equivalents, which is up from $17.2 million at the end of 2011.

Looking forward to the third quarter, Brightcove forecast revenue in a range of $21.1 million and $21.6 million, with a non-GAAP operating loss between $3.1 million and $2.8 million. That’s a non-GAAP loss of $0.11 or $0.12 per share. For the full year, it sees revenue between $85.3 million and $86.0 million, with a non-GAAP loss between $10.5 million and $9.5 million, or between $0.47 and $0.44 per share.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LG has been turning a corner of late, getting its mobile division out of a six-quarter-long rut.

Today’s Q2 report outlines a 46 percent increase in net profits year-over-year at $138 million, though phone sales continue to be an obstacle.

Overall revenues went up from last quarter, but are still down from a year ago. The handset division in particular had an operating loss of $49.5 million, which has a lot to do with the decline in feature phone sales. Smartphone sales, on the other hand, rose to 44 percent of all units sold, which is up from Q1′s 36 percent.

It’s not expected that LG compete directly with the iPhone, but the company has to make a push against other Android competitors. In every review of an LG phone, we’ve been pretty sorely disappointed. Meanwhile, Samsung, HTC and Motorola continue to deliver premium experiences on Google’s mobile platform.

Even so, LG truly does seem to be turning things around, albeit just barely.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch