RSSPalm reaches all-time high in sales, painfully low profits
By Tim Conneally | Published June 27, 2008, 6:14 PM
Centro manufacturer Palm Inc. announced that despite record high sales, its fourth quarter revenue was well below forecasts, reporting losses of $43.4 million.
The Centro is proving to be the flagship device for Palm, that is to say, it's been just enough to buoy the company through flagging Treo sales until the 800w ships.
2008's fourth quarter sales for the Palm Centro were a record high 968,000 units, a 15% increase over last quarter. Centro sales are actually exceeding expectations for the company, but are providing too low a margin to offset the losses in Treo sales.
All year, the company has been putting emphasis on the first quarter of 2009 as the turning point where Palm will begin the return to profitability. In the Q&A following Palm's earnings statement yesterday, CEO Ed Colligan said, "We need to get the Windows Mobile products into our product line. As I said in my comments, those are coming very soon. We will rebuild that line during this next few months and we expect those to contribute to improved gross margins and improved revenue growth."
Earlier in the year, IDC research showed the Centro had given Palm 13.4% of the smartphone market, with a majority of users being first-time smartphone buyers. By the third quarter of the year, shipments of Palm devices reached 826,000, an increase of 13%, but revenues were down nearly $29.2 million.
Colligan at that time said the Centro was helping the company grow to new customers and "help [Palm} to some extent offset the declines in some of our older aging product lines, including Windows Mobile and older Treos."
The Centro's newly increased availability through Verizon may just keep the company afloat long enough to meet the release of the Treo 800w, but after that, it's sink or swim.
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|I'm amazed how people say Treos are s***, and yet STILL mention that Windows Mobile may be the reason. There are millions of other Windows Mobile devices out there and most of them function properly. If Palm built decent hardware, Windows Mobile would perform accordingly. (And Centros prove they can when they try.)
I've been using Windows Mobile phones for the past 5 years or so and never had problems I couldn't solve in a few hours.
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|Treo 700W here. We had a funny thing happen... One of our staff insisted on the Treo 700 in late 2006 after a week's worth of testing. The rest of us were glad to get any smartphone. After a month of use, we saw the flaws in the model show up. Here it is ~2 years later, and the phone survives, but what a POS it's been. Various issues:
1. Deleted all my pictures as I was moving from the phone to SD card.
2. Not enough memory on this model to run programs without crashing. VZ released the WX model was because they realized this.
3. Windows Mobile OS is long-in-the tooth. However I bet MSFT has huge plans for WM7, because they are just going to get creamed from Apple and goog now.
4. The number of times I've been unable to answer calls, dock to USB, etc because some portion of the OS crashed is too numerous to mention. We finally stopped loading third party applications on the device because it was almost certain to cause it to behave bizarrely. Palm: Never again, even if WIndows Mobile may have been the cause...
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|I started with a TREO 650. I then upgraded to a 750 model.
I am very unhappy with the 750 as the bluetooth function does not work in either my car or my wife's car.
The 750 also takes forever to upload/download to my laptop.
I have tried to communicate with the Help Desk but it seems the MS OS is the problem. Too Bad
This failure really limits the product's desirability.
I have gone back to my 650 for now. Will watch both TREO and Blackberry to see if new products will work to my simply needs.
Palm could do a much better job of marketing its products.
Thank you.
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|Nobody but Palm could screw up so bad. I still favor Palm over any other device - just bought a Treo 755p 2 days ago to hang with my current TX and T3 (and one more TX on ice as backup). I buy and use Palm because I'm in FAR to deep after "using" since the original Pilot... I've spent more on Palm software than PC over the years! It stinks that I keep giving my hard earned cash to these clowns, but I have nowhere else to go. I so wish they would hire some people with business (and technological) smarts.
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|@SELonBN...
Get a Windows Mobile device and use Styletap to run all of your palm apps on it ;)
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