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T-Mobile UK isn’t doing well lately and thus its parent company, Deutsche Telekom, is looking for ways to make things better.

One way to solve its problems would be to sell the British carrier. The estimated enterprise value of T-Mobile UK is of €3 billion – €4 billion ($4.2 billion – $5.6 billion), and it looks like Vodafone, one of the UK’s market leaders and one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies, is interested in buying the carrier.

According to the Financial Times, Vodafone is also considering setting up a joint-venture with T-Mobile UK.

In both cases, the newly-formed company would become UK’s largest mobile operator ever, with a 40% market share (Vodafone currently has about 21 million customers, while T-Mobile has about 16 million).

It’s not clear yet if regulators will approve a transaction between Vodafone and T-Mobile UK. And since the two companies have not commented on the matter yet, we just have to wait and see how things evolve.

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LG might soon ship more 3G handsets worldwide than Samsung, helped by the fast-growing Chinese mobile market.

Currently the world’s third largest phone maker (behind Nokia and Samsung), LG is the only international manufacturer that was selected to provide 3G phones for all of China’s carriers: China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, which together have more than 600 million customers.

Furthermore, it’s said that China Telecom has given LG the right to produce one third of its upcoming 3G handsets.

LG has already announced two 3G phones for the Chinese market: the TD-SCDMA LG KT878 for China Mobile, and the LG KV920 for China Telecom – both pictured below.

The company plans to release three or four other TD-SCDMA handsets this year, and 10 more in 2010.

In the first quarter of 2009, LG only had 3.8% of the Chinese mobile market share. Nokia had 32%, Samsung 18% and Motorola 8%.

Via Telecoms Korea

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So, there’s good news and bad news here, and we’re opting to go against tradition by dishing out the positive first. Nokia just pushed out its Q1 2009 results, and while many firms have been struggling to stay afloat, at least it managed to turn a profit of €122 million ($160 million). That said, it’s still looking at a staggering 90 percent drop in profits compared to its first quarter of 2008, where it raked in a mind-boggling €1.222 billion ($1.6 billion). Not surprisingly, sales were also down 27 percent to €9.28 billion ($12.2 billion) from €12.7 billion ($16.7 billion). Of course, Nokia’s far from being alone in having to showcase less-than-beautiful Q1 numbers, but in reality, the damage could’ve been much worse; in fact, shares of the company’s stock inched up by 8 percent following the reveal, as many had feared an even more significant decline. All in all, Nokia’s still holding strong to a 37 percent market share worldwide, and if CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo has anything to do with it (hint: he does), things should be on the up and up here soon.

[Via BBC]
Source

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Only one week after announcing it shipped more than 2 million Cookie phones, LG has now made another official announcement, saying that it sold no less than 20 million QWERTY phones worldwide.

Most of them were sold in North America, where LG introduced its messaging phones in 2005 (Verizon’s VX9800 was the first one).

During 2005, there were 350,000 LG QWERTY phones sold worldwide. In 2006, the number almost doubled, reaching 600,000 units. The following year (2007), brought sales of 2.7 milloin units, while in 2008 LG shipped 12.7 million QWERTY-equipped handsets.

Phones like LG enV and LG Rumor are very popular in the US. For example, the enV series reached 8 million units sold, the Rumor series 6 million, and the Voyager series topped 3.5 million units.

Thanks to the success of its messaging phones, LG now has a 20.8% mobile market share in North America – a significant increase from the 15.8% share reported in 2007.

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Last month, rumors swirled that Apple had purchased a large quantity of 10″ touch panel displays, leading many to believe that Apple is creating a netbook to compete with small, inexpensive Windows PCs later this year. Netbooks — which have been driving most of the PC sales growth the past few months — have proven a delicate balancing act for manufacturers that want to portray them as a second or even third computer. However, nearly all consumers have opted for netbooks with Windows, which makes them compatible with the same software programs being run on more expensive notebooks or desktops.

So far, Apple has abstained from the netbook trend to the benefit of its profit margins and the detriment of its market share, but the company has a unique set of assets and design philosophy that could lead to a netbook that better embraces the concept than those of its competitors. Among these assets are its own operating system available for both PC and mobile configurations and computing requirements, its own fast and modern browser and productivity suite, and local (via iTunes) and WAN-based (via MobileMe) synchronization.

In the mobile space, it has a thriving developer community excited by, if occasionally frustrated by, its application store that has spawned responses from Microsoft, RIM and Nokia. Apple is also strong in the education market, and students have been among the best target markets for netbooks. What, then, would Apple bring to the table?

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Remember the old days when Microsoft was dragged kicking and screaming into offering Windows XP on netbooks? Neither does Microsoft, apparently, as the company is now all too happy to boast that a full 96% of the netbooks on the market run on its venerable OS. It’s also, unsurprisingly, quick to point out that virtually all of that growth comes at the expense of Linux, which Microsoft once again notes sees much higher rates of return once folks “realize their Linux-based netbook PC doesn’t deliver that same quality of experience.” Of course, all of this talk also has a little something to do with the even more netbook-minded Windows 7 which, ironically, could well be trying to peel off some market share from XP by this time next year.