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Only major players are listed.
[Ericsson] [Casio][Hewlett Packard] [Motorola] [Nokia] [Psion] [3Com] [Other]
The Swedish company Ericsson is one of the worlds leading manufacturers of mobile phone handsets, having made 23.8m of them in 1998, 15% of the world's market. It also made 40% of the world's mobile network systems. It has benefitted by the early adoption of mobiles within Scandinavia where communities are remote and many people have country cottages. In Finland 60% of the population have a mobile. Ericsson and its rival Nokia where able to quickly exploit their expertise in GSM phones when GSM based networks were later adopted in the rest of Europe.
Ericsson's profits for the 1Q 1999 at £96m were 50% down on 1Q 1998 and just 21% of the 4Q 1998. The drop was attributed to the overhaul of its fixed line business which is adapting to a market shift from voice to data networks. Mobile phones are only 25% of its total business but even that operation did not help much, as current models were then at the end of their life cycle. Operating margins fell from 7.5% to 4.3% 1Q 98 to 1Q 99. In December 1998 Ericsson issued a profits warning and planned to axe 30,000 staff. The share price plummeted.
Ericsson has its main factory and research centre at Kista, 16 km north of Stockholm, where it employs 10,000 people in a business park environment. Research work is well advanced on the next generation of UMTS handsets and systems. In March 1999 Ericsson acquired Qualcomm who were proposing a different US UMTS standard. As part of the deal it was agreed to develop a near common standard.
Ericsson is a member of the Symbian consortium.which is developing the EPOC operating system for use in the more advanced mobile phones.
Ericsson is one of the companies involved with Vodafone's global Internet plans.
Casio has linked up with Vodafone to provide a PDA device for accessing mobile services. Music and video are being talked about.
Casio has also linked with Siemens to develop a combined phone and Windows CE-based wireless PDA. Prototypes to be shown at the February 2000 CeBIT show in Hanover. It will have a full telephony features, colour screen, and wireless Net access support.
Motorola is the world's no. 2 manufacturer of mobile handsets, after being toppled from no. 1 by Nokia. Motorola 1998 sales were 32.2m handsets, 19.8% of the market.
In January 2000 it announced deal with Psion to develop a range of mobile Internet access devices, for launch in the first half of 2001.
The Finish company Nokia is the no. 1 manufacturer of mobile phones. This is remarkable given that 10 years ago Nokia was still predominately a paper and rubber company. In 1998 Nokia sold 37.4 m of the world's 163m mobile phones, that's 23%. Within the US it sold 35% of the digital phones. Like Ericsson, it has benefitted by the early adoption of mobiles within Scandinavia. The Finish use their phones a lots - although consumers pay the full price for their phones (£100 or more) the call costs are almost the same as a fixed line phone.
Nokia began in 1865 in the Finnish town of Nokia, first in paper making but gradually expanding through acquisitions into industrial cables, aluminium, power generation, rubber boots and tyres. In the late 1970s Nokia acquired a number of telecommunications and electronics companies and in 1982 Nokia launched its first mobile phone - weighing 10 kg!
Then in the late 1980s it suffered a number of internal and external shocks: their CE committed suicide and its chief strategist die and to add to the misery the collapse of the Soviet Union, Finland's largest export market, created a recession. In 1992, Jorma Ollila, the head of the mobile phone division and a previous employee at Citibank, was appointed group CE. He refocussed the company on mobile phones and divested the old non telecommunications and electronic businesses. Then again in 1995 the company almost collapsed then it had problems supplying the huge demand for its phones.
Nokia, with a capitalisation of more than £xxxbn, now commands 50% of the value of the Helsinki Stock Exchange and 10% of Finland's GDP. Its 1998 sales were almost £9bn and pre-tax profits are £1.5bn. Half the sales are in Europe. Total employees are 44,000 with half being based in Finland. 1st quarter 1999 pre-profits were double 1Q 1998 though slightly down on 4Q 1998. Operating margins rose to 19.8% from 15.6% 1Q 98 to 1Q 99. Sales growth for 1999 was predicted to be 25-35% up on 1998.
Nokia is considered to be ahead in the development of handsets for the next generation of UMTS handsets. It has a large factory and research centre in Salo, a small town 130 km north of Helsinki, where it employs 5,600 people. In the factory, the engineers sit next to the assembly lines so they are able to quickly resolve any problems.
Nokia, like Ericsson, is a member of the Symbian consortium.which is developing the EPOC operating system for use in the more advanced mobile phones. With mobile phone sales set to treble by 2003 to over 1 billion, Nokia should continue to prosper but the future will be more competitive as the 3rd generation phones and PDAs drive computer companies into the mobile market.
Nokia is one of the companies involved with Vodafone's global Internet plans.
It was the key founding partner of the Symbian Consortium when it offered it's EPOC operating system.
Psion is one of the companies involved with Vodafone's global Internet plans.
In January 2000 it announced deal with Motorola to develop a range of mobile Internet access devices, for launch in the first half of 2001.
Founded in 1979 the company was the pioneer of the Ethernet networking standard. It then moved into modem and ISDN technologies and in recent years has become famous for its Palm Pilot handheld devices, the latest which can communicate over wireless networks. In 1999 it purchased SmartCode, a wireless software developer that had developed SMS software for PalmOS, the operating system for the Palm Pilot devices.
3Com is also developed the communicating devices of the future such as DSL cable modems and mini home networks running over the electricity wires. In 1998 it formed an alliance with Siemens to develop systems that integrate data, voice and video over single networks.
Also see below under Palm Computing, 3Com's software division who make the PalmOS operating system for the Palm Pilot.
Benefon has produced a mobile phone that incorporates both a WAP microbrowser and Microsoft's Mobile Explore so users can access Internet sites without waiting for those sites to be WAP enabled. What sort of screen it has, and how well it displays standard web pages with images, tables and frames is unknown. It also has an e-mail client.
Only major players are listed in detail with brief listing of other useful products. As value added data services become available the importance of software will increase, as will the number of suppliers.
[IBM] [Microsoft] [Motorola] [Oracle] [Symbian Consortium] [Palm Computing (3Com)] [Other]
IBM has teamed up with Nokia to develop WAP servers and associated technologies. For example, IBM will market the Nokia WAP server on its Netfinity line of servers giving corporates the ability to deliver services to mobile users.
IBM has developed a lite DB2 database, coming in at just 50K in size, for Palm and CE based devices with EPOC under development. IBM is one of the companies involved with Vodafone's global Internet plans.
Within the mobile market Microsoft offers the Windows CE operating system which has been adopted by many manufacturers of PDAs.
In November 1998 Microsoft announced a tie-up with Qualcomm, a well established communications company, to offer WirelessKnowledge with the aim of creating a seamless communications and software infrastructure from back office to mobile device. It will offer this as a US bureau (outsourcing) service to user companies and telecommunications companies, 9 of whom signed-up at launch. In March 1999 Ericsson acquired Qualcomm.
In February 1999, Microsoft and BT joined forces to develop Internet access for mobile users. In October it announced trials of GSM mobile phones equipped with a microbrowser developed by Microsoft and the UK company STNC. 1,000 BT's customers at the BBC, Credit Suisse, First Boston, KPMG and Nortel Networks are involved in the trial. STNC's brower has also been adopted by the Symbian consortium.
In May 1999 Microsoft purchased the Swedish company Sendit, developers of CE based software for providing wireless e-mail and messaging via a link to (some) mobile phones. Then in July Microsoft acquired STNC, a small UK-based company that has developed software for mobile phones and handheld computers. Then in December of the same year, using this software, Microsoft launched its own microbrowser called Mobile Explorer. It will be available on a number of different hardware and software platforms including Windows CE.
Also in December, Microsoft joined forces with Ericsson to launch a new company to market and deliver mobile email solutions for network operators. This partnership will use the new Microsoft microbrowser. Ericsson now has a foot in both camps: Microsoft's and Symbian (see EPOC). Ericsson will provide its WAP software to Microsoft and in turn will use MS's Mobile Explorer software in its range of feature (smart) phones. They will also co-operate on the development of open industry standards such as Universal Plug and Play, WAP and Bluetooth. Earlier Microsoft had purchased SendIT, a Swedish mobile e-mail software company.
Motorola has developed software allowing voice commands to browse the internet with the text response converted into speech. Called VoxML, it is based on the XML standard and consists of server and client software and also relies heavily on Microsoft software technologies. Motorola is a member of the Symbian consortium.
Motorola has also developed another technique, together with BroadVision and Visa International, which it calls Vcommerce. Vcommerce is based on Java and Active X. Similar developments are underway by IBM, Lucent Technologies, Texas Instruments and others.
Oracle is developing a lite version of its database especially for mobile products using Symbian's EPOC operating system. It is also developing software under the name Portal-to-Go which will generate WML web pages suitable for WAP devices. Project Panama will provide WAP Internet access to Oracle databases using XML for PalmOS and eventually CE machines.
Founded by Psion, Ericsson, and Nokia, and joined later by Motorola, Matsushita and 3Com, the Symbian Consortium owns, develops and licences the EPOC operating system originally developed by Psion and used in its keyboard PDAs. EPOC has been specifically identified by Microsoft as a major threat to the adoption of Windows CE operating system for mobile devices. Symbian also has technical partners such as Oracle and Sybase providing infrastructure software. Licensing fees are $5 per unit for a smartphone and $10 for a communicator.
Palm Computing Platform is the division of 3Com that developed the PalmOS operating system for 3Com's Palm Pilot range of handheld PDAs. Whilst it has also been adopted by Qualcomm and Symbol and there are licensing agreements with Nokia and Sony, its use has been mostly restricted to the Palm Pilots. Nether-the-less, 3Com has sold millions of these devices - in 1998 over 1.4m taking 72% of the world market for handheld PDAs though this was less in Europe in 1999. Over 17,000 software developer kits have also been acquired and many specialist applications are available. More recently 3Com has joined the Symbian Consortium.
Palm Computing has developed software called Web Clipping that allows specially adapted web sites to send information to Palm Pilot VIIs. In August 1999 Palm Computing announced that WAP support would be incorporated into PalmOS for 3rd party licencees.
3Com, Palm Computing's owners, announced in January 2000 that it will IPO 4% of Palm Computing worth $368m, with more shares to be sold in 6 months time.
Aspiro, a Swedish company, has developed a WAP microbrowser that will run on the SIM cards in mobile phones so existing users can access WAP web sites without having to purchase a new WAP phone.
Argo has developed software to convert HTML pages to WML pages on the fly. It will do the same for information from other sources such as news feeds.
AvantGo is a developer of microbrowsers and other standard applications software.
BlueSky have developed data compression software that reduces the size of web pages making it more practical to send them via GSM phones. It is trying to sell the idea to network providers.
Dialogue Communications has developed software to generate WML from Microsoft Exchange, Unix mail and Lotus Notes.
Nokia has also developed a WAP server that will translate HTLM pages into WML pages.
Palm Computing is a developer of microbrowsers and other standard applications software. It is one of the companies involved with Vodafone's global Internet plans.
Phone.com is a developer of microbrowsers and other standard applications software.
Sun Microsystems is one of the companies involved with Vodafone's global Internet plans.
Sybase created client software for its database over 2 years ago, again in under 50K. Microsoft has reportedly created a version for CE machines.
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