Motorola and Ericsson reports for Q4

As the 2009 Q4 quarterly reports continue to hit the news and another year ends, it will be worthwhile to take an overview of the state the market for the major network equipment vendors once all the earnings reports are in. As two of my previous employers, Motorola and Ericsson reported last week lets just take a look at how they fared in the last quarter and over 2009 as a whole.
As can be seen in the table, Ericsson and Motorola, both saw a decline in revenues for Q4 and 2009 as a whole but it will be interesting to see if this trend is seen by their competitors. On the operating profits side, while Ericsson profits declined almost in line with revenues, we can see that despite declining revenues, Motorola still managed to be profitable over the quarter compared to a €2.6Billion loss over the same period 12 months previous. Is this a sign that Motorola have managed turn this round for the forseeable future? Lets look at this again at the end of Q1 to see if the progress continues.

This week I attended the following a Light Reading Managed Security Services Webinar by Crossbeam Systems. It covered new security challenges including security for cloud-based services. Crossbeam offers Service Providers a managed security solution that they can offer their own customers. Described Snort which is an open source network intrusion prevention and detection system (IDS/IPS) developed by Sourcefire.

Last week in the news...
Ericsson as noted above reported 4th quarter results announcing a drop in profits but narrowly avoiding a decline in revenues over the full year despite the ailing economy. Revenues were SEK58.3B (€5.7B) and SEK206.5B (€20.1B) for the quarter and full year respectively. Notably, while revenues from sales from network infrastructure have been declining, revenues from managed services continue to grow. Full details available from here.

Motorola Q4 results are also available here. Other big news in tech this week was Apple's annoucement regarding their new tablet computer, the iPad. For the time being though, I'm going to focus on network infrastructure news as this is of more interest to me and leave consumer electronics news to other fora.