revenue

Palm's third quarter was a disaster, the fourth-quarter outlook was worse, and the company is stuck with an inventory glut as Verizon Wireless customers went with the BlackBerry Tour and Motorola Droid over the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus. The big question: where does Palm go from here?

Simply put, Palm is in a vicious cycle that goes like this:

• Sales in the company's third quarter were weak. So weak that Palm's sell-through in the third quarter was 408,000 units vs. a sell-in of 960,000 units. That means Palm seriously overestimated demand for its devices. … Read more

Ars Technica's Ken Fisher recently wrote an impassioned plea to turn off ad-blocking software like AdBlock Plus to save the online publishing industry. His attempt to turn back the clock on digitization, however, would likely accomplish the opposite.

Fisher has a good point: ad-blocking software almost certainly does hurt sites like CNET by denying them revenue. As he points out, "[m]ost [large] sites...are paid on a per view basis," not a click-through basis, which means that ad-blocking software very literally takes money out of the pockets of publishers, leading consumers to "devastat[e]...the … Read more

Facebook may pull in an excess of $1 billion in revenues, according to estimates and poking around on behalf of industry blog Inside Facebook. That's an increase from the same publication's estimate of $700 million last year.

Facebook board member Marc Andreessen said last year that he projected the company would break $500 million revenue in 2009, and that it had the potential to be a billion-dollar company already, but that it was acting conservatively.

(Naturally, Facebook says that as a privately held company it doesn't disclose its financials.)

What can Facebook credit this big jump in … Read more

Following a rough 2009, global sales of semiconductors are expected to rise nearly 20 percent this year, according to research released this week by Gartner.

Sales are projected to hit $276 billion this year, an increase of nearly 20 percent, compared with $231 billion last year. The boost in revenue will come courtesy of rising DRAM (dynamic random access memory) prices as well as greater consumer demand for personal computers. Commonly used in PCs, DRAM is likely to be the fastest growing type of chip, with DRAM sales alone shooting up 55 percent this year, according to Gartner.

The semiconductor … Read more

Palm's smartphone recovery took a big hit Thursday as the company sharply cut its outlook for the third quarter and fiscal 2010 because "driving broad consumer adoption of Palm products is taking longer than we anticipated."

How ugly is it? Palm said its third-quarter revenue will be $285 million to $310 million under generally accepted accounting principles. Non-GAAP revenue will be $300 million to $320 million.

The problem: Wall Street is looking for revenue of $424.7 million.

For fiscal 2010, Palm also said its revenue will be "well below its previously forecasted range of $1.… Read more

EMC's fourth quarter closed strong as both earnings and revenue came in ahead of expectations. The company also raised its outlook for 2010.

The storage giant reported fourth quarter net income of $426.5 million, or 20 cents a share, on revenue of $4.1 billion, up 2 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings in the fourth quarter were $695.5 million, or 33 cents a share.

Wall Street was expecting earnings of 30 cents a share on revenue of $4.02 billion. For 2009, EMC reported net income of $1.1 billion, or 55 cents a share, … Read more

IBM on Tuesday beat Wall Street's estimates for the fourth quarter, reporting income of $4.8 billion, or $3.59 per share, a 10 percent jump from the year-ago quarter. Revenue for the quarter was $27.2 billion, down slightly when adjusted for currency. (Statement)

Analysts had been expecting earnings of $3.47 per share on sales of $26.98 billion.

For the fiscal year, the company reported net income of $13.4 billion, or $13.01 per share, a 13 percent gain over the previous year. Sales for the year were $95.8 billion, an 8 percent drop … Read more

The semiconductor industry is set to post a revenue drop of $29 billion for this year, according to research firm Gartner.

Worldwide revenue for 2009 totaled $226 billion, down 11.4 percent from 2008, the company said in a research report published on Thursday. It marks only the sixth time in 25 years that the semiconductor industry has posted an annual decline, and is the first time it has seen a drop for two years in a row, according to Gartner.

While revenue fell sharply at the beginning of 2009, carrying on a fall prompted by the economic recession the … Read more

Third-quarter sales of servers across the globe showed a 17.3 percent decline from the same quarter in 2008, sagging to $10.4 billion, according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker.

But server shipments improved, falling only 17.9 percent for the quarter, compared with 30.1 percent in the second quarter, noted the IDC report released Wednesday. Even more promising, shipments grew at a healthy 12.4 percent over the second quarter, the market's largest sequential quarterly gain since 2005.

All three server segments tracked by IDC--volume, midrange enterprise, and high-end enterprise--saw lower third-quarter sales compared with … Read more