Palm Q4 FY08 Conference Call Highlights :: News :: Getjar Forum

Palm Q4 FY08 Conference Call Highlights

Palm Inc. announced their fourth consecutive quarterly loss today. The company posted a fourth quarter loss of $43.4 million. In its conference call Palm blamed the loss on lower average margins, its continued transition and declining sales of its aging Windows Mobile product line. All the news was not negative and increasing Centro momentum drove significant gains in market share and record smartphone sell through for Palm. The company also announced it will be refreshing its entire Windows Mobile line utilizing Microsoft's latest offerings over the next few months.

Palm CEO Ed Colligan started off the call talking about the continuing transformation of the company. He remarked that while Palm has gone through another difficult quarter financially, he has "never felt more enthusiastic about our product pipeline and ability to get back on the right track."

He went on to say that strong sales of the Palm Centro were driving the record smartphone sell through. Palm sold 968,000 smartphones over the quarter up 19% from the previous quarter. However, the lower average selling price and slimmer margins on the Centro combined with slowing Windows Mobile smartphone and handheld sales, resulted in reduced revenue of $296 million.

Centro is a hit slideThe usual round of praise was given to Palm's restructuring efforts. Ed highlighted two recent major hires to the Palm development team. Mike Abbot comes from Microsoft where he was a key architect of the team developing .net services. He is the new SVP of Application Software & Services and is tasked with driving integration between network services and on-device applications for a more compelling web experience. Way Ting comes from Silicon Graphics where he spent several years developing SG's core OS layers. As the new SVP of System Software he is tasked with insuring the Palm's core OS elements are world-class and are delivered on time.

During the quarter Palm's revenue mix was 90% smartphones and 10% handhelds. 83% of revenue was from the US and 17% international. Revenue was $296.2 million with a 25.2% Gross Margin. 913,000 smartphones were shipped on 958k sell-trhough with an average selling price of $288. Handheld revenue came in at $30.6 million on 159,000 units shipped with 185k unit sell-through. Handheld sales have been steadily declining for years now and were down 20% from the last quarter.

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