Big trouble in little China. The surprise shortfall in iPhone sales is beginning to look more like an industry problem than an Apple-specific one. Samsung said its fourth-quarter revenue shrank 11% and operating profit declined 29% from the year before, surprising analysts. Slow demand for memory chips and “intensifying competition” for phones were to blame. Then, LG said its profits plummeted 80% with revenue down 7%. Ouch.
Turn it on. Set-top box and Internet video services platform (they hate it when we call them just a set-top box maker) Roku pre-announced a bit of fourth quarter news as well, but on the upside. The company said it ended the quarter with 27 million active accounts, a 40% jump from the prior year. Roku’s share price jumped 25%.
You must pay the rent. Plans for SoftBank Group‘s Vision Fund to buy a controlling stake in WeWork for $16 billion are off the table, the Financial Times reports. Instead, the deal will now have SoftBank directly inject a mere $2 billion into the shared office space startup, without involving the Vision Fund.
Filing first. The scramble to claim the crown for best R&D went to IBM for 2018, at least by one key measure. The company scored a record 9,100 U.S. patents, followed by Samsung with 5,850, and Canon with 3,056, according to research firm IFI Claims.
Pond skating. After struggling for years to move to 10-nanometer chip production, Intel is finally getting some products out of the more efficient manufacturing process. At CES, the company showed off 10-nm chips, codenamed Ice Lake, running in PCs and a laptop.
This story was originally published by Fortune
via USAHint.com
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