Published: January 29, 2010
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- Samsung Electronics Co. returned to profit in the fourth-quarter on strong sales of flat screen televisions and mobile phones as well as higher prices for computer memory chips following a rare loss the year before.
The company, a major global producer of consumer electronics products and components that make them work, earned 3.05 trillion won ($2.64 billion) in the three months ended Dec. 31 on a parent basis, it said in a statement.
Samsung had a net loss of 22 billion won in the same period the year before. That red ink -- Samsung's first since it began reporting results on a quarterly basis in the third quarter of 2000 -- sent shockwaves through the company and came as the global economic slump hit demand.
Samsung said its "strong performance" during the fourth-quarter last year was bolstered by improving prices for memory chips and a seasonal increase in sales of consumer electronics.
Samsung said it sold nearly 11 million flat screen TVs in the quarter and became the first manufacturer to exceed the 10 million mark.
The company sold 69 million mobile phone handsets in the quarter, up 16 percent from the same period the year before. Total 2009 sales reached 227 million.
Looking ahead, the company said it expects "positive growth across its businesses in 2010," citing stronger demand for flat screen TVs, mobile phones and laptop computers resulting from the ongoing economic recovery.
The Suwon, South Korea-based company is the world's largest manufacturer of computer memory chips, flat screen televisions and liquid crystal displays. It ranks No. 2 in cell phones behind Finland's Nokia Corp. (NYSE:NOK)
Samsung said sales in the fourth quarter reached 25.32 trillion won, which was 37 percent higher that the 18.45 trillion won reported a year earlier.
In a separate regulatory filing, the company said that it earned 9.65 trillion won in all of 2009. It reported a net profit of 5.53 trillion won in 2008. Samsung also said sales last year rose 23 percent to 89.77 trillion won from 72.95 trillion won the year before.
Shares in Samsung, which released its earnings results about 30 minutes after the stock market opened, fell 2 percent to 792,000 won in late morning trading. The company's stock price rose 77 percent in 2009.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Haiti Task Force Commander Notes Progress
By Judith SnydermanAmerican Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Jan. 19, 2010 – Humanitarian assistance efforts in Haiti are improving every day despite enormous challenges, the commander of Joint Task Force Haiti said.
"Today, we had 180 flights go through the airport with zero delays,” Army Lt. Gen. P.K. “Ken” Keen said yesterday during a “DoDLive” bloggers roundtable. “That's the first day since we started that we did not have a delay." For perspective, Keen noted that the single runway at the Port-au-Prince airport handled just 13 flights per day before the earthquake. U.S. airmen opened the airport less than 24 hours after the earthquake in response to a request for help from Haitian authorities. It then took several days to streamline the system for handling the crush of planes carrying supplies. Landing time slots now are now assigned based on priorities set by Haitian officials, he explained. As of yesterday, U.S. troops had distributed 400,000 bottles of water, 300,000 rations and 12,000 pounds of medical supplies, Keen said, adding that those figures count only U.S. contributions. Numerous nations and international aid groups also are delivering assistance, he said. But while the amount of aid is substantial, Keen said, it's just a drop in the bucket compared to the needs of some 3.5 million people who are suffering, so the size of U.S. military force in Haiti -- in an operation now dubbed “Unified Response” -- will continue to grow. "We have about 1,400 military on the ground right now,” he said. “We have another approximately 5,000 that are afloat on various ships supporting us. We will grow that force over the coming weeks to where we will have about 4,000 to 5,000 on Haiti and another 5,000 offshore supporting us." Among the assets moving toward Haiti are the hospital ship USNS Comfort, which can supply up to 1,000 hospital beds. The USS Bataan also has arrivedA arrived, and a Marine landing battalion from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit is expected to go ashore today to one of the hardest-hit regions outside Port-au-Prince that has been beyond the reach of help until now. Keen clarified the boundaries of the role that U.S. troops will play. He stressed that their priority is to distribute aid in partnership with other agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development. "My mission is to provide humanitarian assistance, disaster relief and security in order to execute delivery of that [assistance and relief supplies]," he said. He added that the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti remains primarily in charge of security and that U.N. troops who had been successful in significantly reducing gang activity prior to the earthquake now are at work to contain pockets of violence that have cropped up in the disaster’s chaotic aftermath. Keen said he has not witnessed what some media reports characterize as a rising tide of violence. "All the places that U.S. forces have gone thus far have been very calm,” he said. “In fact, they've been overtly welcoming. People have been very orderly, and they’ve been very appreciative of all the aid that they've been given." Looking ahead, Keen said, he counts water purification units in the next group of priorities. Sixteen units had arrived yesterday, with five more due today. Opening the ports also is a critical need, he said. "We've got to have other means to get cargo in here and take pressure off the airport, " he explained. Assessment teams have determined that both the main port and a fuel pier are inoperable. Keen said he expects to have one of the ports operating with limited capacity by the end of the week, possibly using landing craft. Keen also told bloggers about another sign of progress in organizing the massive international relief effort: a new humanitarian coordination center that has been established using U.N. facilities. The idea, he said, is to have one place to funnel the immense outpouring of donation sto determine whether any given donation is needed and where should it be stacked if it is. Keen, who was in Haiti when the earthquake struck, said the response so far has been tremendous. "I am proud of what our nation and the international community has done," he said. (Judith Snyderman works in the Defense Media Activity’s emerging media directorate.)
WASHINGTON, Jan. 19, 2010 – Humanitarian assistance efforts in Haiti are improving every day despite enormous challenges, the commander of Joint Task Force Haiti said.
"Today, we had 180 flights go through the airport with zero delays,” Army Lt. Gen. P.K. “Ken” Keen said yesterday during a “DoDLive” bloggers roundtable. “That's the first day since we started that we did not have a delay." For perspective, Keen noted that the single runway at the Port-au-Prince airport handled just 13 flights per day before the earthquake. U.S. airmen opened the airport less than 24 hours after the earthquake in response to a request for help from Haitian authorities. It then took several days to streamline the system for handling the crush of planes carrying supplies. Landing time slots now are now assigned based on priorities set by Haitian officials, he explained. As of yesterday, U.S. troops had distributed 400,000 bottles of water, 300,000 rations and 12,000 pounds of medical supplies, Keen said, adding that those figures count only U.S. contributions. Numerous nations and international aid groups also are delivering assistance, he said. But while the amount of aid is substantial, Keen said, it's just a drop in the bucket compared to the needs of some 3.5 million people who are suffering, so the size of U.S. military force in Haiti -- in an operation now dubbed “Unified Response” -- will continue to grow. "We have about 1,400 military on the ground right now,” he said. “We have another approximately 5,000 that are afloat on various ships supporting us. We will grow that force over the coming weeks to where we will have about 4,000 to 5,000 on Haiti and another 5,000 offshore supporting us." Among the assets moving toward Haiti are the hospital ship USNS Comfort, which can supply up to 1,000 hospital beds. The USS Bataan also has arrivedA arrived, and a Marine landing battalion from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit is expected to go ashore today to one of the hardest-hit regions outside Port-au-Prince that has been beyond the reach of help until now. Keen clarified the boundaries of the role that U.S. troops will play. He stressed that their priority is to distribute aid in partnership with other agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development. "My mission is to provide humanitarian assistance, disaster relief and security in order to execute delivery of that [assistance and relief supplies]," he said. He added that the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti remains primarily in charge of security and that U.N. troops who had been successful in significantly reducing gang activity prior to the earthquake now are at work to contain pockets of violence that have cropped up in the disaster’s chaotic aftermath. Keen said he has not witnessed what some media reports characterize as a rising tide of violence. "All the places that U.S. forces have gone thus far have been very calm,” he said. “In fact, they've been overtly welcoming. People have been very orderly, and they’ve been very appreciative of all the aid that they've been given." Looking ahead, Keen said, he counts water purification units in the next group of priorities. Sixteen units had arrived yesterday, with five more due today. Opening the ports also is a critical need, he said. "We've got to have other means to get cargo in here and take pressure off the airport, " he explained. Assessment teams have determined that both the main port and a fuel pier are inoperable. Keen said he expects to have one of the ports operating with limited capacity by the end of the week, possibly using landing craft. Keen also told bloggers about another sign of progress in organizing the massive international relief effort: a new humanitarian coordination center that has been established using U.N. facilities. The idea, he said, is to have one place to funnel the immense outpouring of donation sto determine whether any given donation is needed and where should it be stacked if it is. Keen, who was in Haiti when the earthquake struck, said the response so far has been tremendous. "I am proud of what our nation and the international community has done," he said. (Judith Snyderman works in the Defense Media Activity’s emerging media directorate.)
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Panic, Looting and Triage After Major Haiti Quake
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 13, 2010
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- The tiny bodies of children lay in piles next to the ruins of their collapsed school. People with faces covered by white dust and the blood of open wounds roamed the streets. Frantic doctors wrapped heads and stitched up sliced limbs in a hotel parking lot.
The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, still struggling to recover from the relentless strikes of four catastrophic storms in 2008, was a picture of heartbreaking devastation Wednesday after a magnitude-7 earthquake.
Tuesday's quake left a landscape of collapsed buildings -- hospitals, schools, churches, ramshackle homes, even the gleaming national palace -- the rubble sending up a white cloud that shrouded the entire capital.
On Wednesday, ambulances weaved in and out of crowds, swerving to miss the bodies lying in street and the men on foot who lugged stretchers bearing some of the injured.
Shocked survivors wandered about in a daze, some wailing the names of loved ones, praying or calling for help. Others with injuries fast growing into infections sat by the roadside, waiting for doctors who were not sure to come.
Search-and-rescue helicopters buzzed over the bodies of partially clothed victims who lay face-down in mounds of rubble and twisted steel.
Everywhere, there was panic, urgency, pleas for help.
''Thousands of people poured out into the streets, crying, carrying bloody bodies, looking for anyone who could help them,'' Bob Poff, divisional director of disaster services in Haiti for the Salvation Army, said in a posting on the agency's Web site.
Poff wrote that he was driving down the mountain from Petionville, a hillside city bordering the capital, when the earthquake struck.
''Our truck was being tossed to and fro like a toy, and when it stopped, I looked out the windows to see buildings 'pancaking' down,'' he wrote.
Poff said he and others piled bodies into the back of his truck and took them down the hill, hoping to get them medical attention.
There was no reliable count, but officials feared thousands, maybe tens of thousands, had died in the quake. Some Haitian leaders suggested the figure could be higher than 100,000. In the chaos, doctors rushed to tend to the countless injured.
The parking lot of Port-au-Prince's Hotel Villa Creole became a triage center. Under tents fashioned from bloody sheets, dozens lay moaning from the pain of cuts in their heads, broken bones and crushed ribs.
''I can't take it any more. My back hurts too much,'' said Alex Georges, 28, who had lain on the parking lot's sloping blacktop for more than a day waiting for help. Just a few feet away lay the dead body of another man who appeared to be about his age.
When the quake struck just before 5 p.m. Tuesday, Georges he was in a meeting with about 30 other students at a school in the neighborhood of Morne Hercule. The roof fell in, he said, killing 11 of his classmates instantly and critically injuring him and others.
Several thousand Haitian police and international peacekeepers poured into the streets Wednesday to clear debris, direct traffic and maintain security. But there was only so much they could do: Looters prowled through shops, then blended into crowds of desperate refugees lugging salvaged possessions. The main prison in the capital fell, and there were reports of escaped inmates, U.. humanitarian spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said in Geneva.
Haitians who could still walk were streaming out of the capital by the hundreds, many of them balancing suitcases and other belongings on their heads as they headed down one of the capital's main streets. Police shouted orders to keep traffic moving at congested intersections as ambulances and United Nations trucks raced toward downtown Port-au-Prince.
In Petionville, people used sledgehammers and their bare hands to excavate a collapsed commercial center, scampering across the rubble as they tossed aside mattresses and office supplies. More than a dozen cars and a U.N. truck were buried underneath.
Up the hill, about 200 victims, including many small children, huddled together in a theater parking lot and rigged tarps out of bed sheets to protect themselves from the scorching sun.
''The immediate need is to rescue people trapped in the rubble, then to get people food and water,'' Sophie Perez, Haiti director of the U.S.-based humanitarian organization CARE, told her colleagues in an e-mail.
''Everything is urgent.''
Published: January 13, 2010
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- The tiny bodies of children lay in piles next to the ruins of their collapsed school. People with faces covered by white dust and the blood of open wounds roamed the streets. Frantic doctors wrapped heads and stitched up sliced limbs in a hotel parking lot.
The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, still struggling to recover from the relentless strikes of four catastrophic storms in 2008, was a picture of heartbreaking devastation Wednesday after a magnitude-7 earthquake.
Tuesday's quake left a landscape of collapsed buildings -- hospitals, schools, churches, ramshackle homes, even the gleaming national palace -- the rubble sending up a white cloud that shrouded the entire capital.
On Wednesday, ambulances weaved in and out of crowds, swerving to miss the bodies lying in street and the men on foot who lugged stretchers bearing some of the injured.
Shocked survivors wandered about in a daze, some wailing the names of loved ones, praying or calling for help. Others with injuries fast growing into infections sat by the roadside, waiting for doctors who were not sure to come.
Search-and-rescue helicopters buzzed over the bodies of partially clothed victims who lay face-down in mounds of rubble and twisted steel.
Everywhere, there was panic, urgency, pleas for help.
''Thousands of people poured out into the streets, crying, carrying bloody bodies, looking for anyone who could help them,'' Bob Poff, divisional director of disaster services in Haiti for the Salvation Army, said in a posting on the agency's Web site.
Poff wrote that he was driving down the mountain from Petionville, a hillside city bordering the capital, when the earthquake struck.
''Our truck was being tossed to and fro like a toy, and when it stopped, I looked out the windows to see buildings 'pancaking' down,'' he wrote.
Poff said he and others piled bodies into the back of his truck and took them down the hill, hoping to get them medical attention.
There was no reliable count, but officials feared thousands, maybe tens of thousands, had died in the quake. Some Haitian leaders suggested the figure could be higher than 100,000. In the chaos, doctors rushed to tend to the countless injured.
The parking lot of Port-au-Prince's Hotel Villa Creole became a triage center. Under tents fashioned from bloody sheets, dozens lay moaning from the pain of cuts in their heads, broken bones and crushed ribs.
''I can't take it any more. My back hurts too much,'' said Alex Georges, 28, who had lain on the parking lot's sloping blacktop for more than a day waiting for help. Just a few feet away lay the dead body of another man who appeared to be about his age.
When the quake struck just before 5 p.m. Tuesday, Georges he was in a meeting with about 30 other students at a school in the neighborhood of Morne Hercule. The roof fell in, he said, killing 11 of his classmates instantly and critically injuring him and others.
Several thousand Haitian police and international peacekeepers poured into the streets Wednesday to clear debris, direct traffic and maintain security. But there was only so much they could do: Looters prowled through shops, then blended into crowds of desperate refugees lugging salvaged possessions. The main prison in the capital fell, and there were reports of escaped inmates, U.. humanitarian spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said in Geneva.
Haitians who could still walk were streaming out of the capital by the hundreds, many of them balancing suitcases and other belongings on their heads as they headed down one of the capital's main streets. Police shouted orders to keep traffic moving at congested intersections as ambulances and United Nations trucks raced toward downtown Port-au-Prince.
In Petionville, people used sledgehammers and their bare hands to excavate a collapsed commercial center, scampering across the rubble as they tossed aside mattresses and office supplies. More than a dozen cars and a U.N. truck were buried underneath.
Up the hill, about 200 victims, including many small children, huddled together in a theater parking lot and rigged tarps out of bed sheets to protect themselves from the scorching sun.
''The immediate need is to rescue people trapped in the rubble, then to get people food and water,'' Sophie Perez, Haiti director of the U.S.-based humanitarian organization CARE, told her colleagues in an e-mail.
''Everything is urgent.''
Monday, January 04, 2010
Google’s Nexus One is the future: a lot more stuff on fewer devices
January 4, 2010
Times Online
Nigel Kendall: analysis
Google’s Nexus One mobile phone may or may not prove to be that elusive “next iPhone”, but the timing of tomorrow’s expected announcement is certainly significant.
Just 24 hours later Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, will address the annual International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The best three years lie ahead, Mr Ballmer told The Times in a recent interview. The idea is that as fields such as television, computing, music, video, telephony, video gaming and photography mature their digital formats, fewer devices will be needed to store and play content.
Portable devices — the MP3 players, digital cameras and mobile phones of the mid-Noughties — have already merged to become today’s smartphones. At this year’s electronics show we can expect digital convergence to invade our living-rooms. Manufacturers are working on internet-capable television sets that can be switched from broadcast to internet catch-up services such as the BBC iPlayer as easily as changing channels. By the end of the decade, many experts predict, internet TV viewing will overtake broadcast viewing as the primary means of television consumption.
The jury is out on domestic 3D TV, which requires special glasses as well as special sets. It may be revolutionary — but having just replaced their old TV with a flat-screen, consumers may not be keen to fork out for a 3D set.
Times Online
Nigel Kendall: analysis
Google’s Nexus One mobile phone may or may not prove to be that elusive “next iPhone”, but the timing of tomorrow’s expected announcement is certainly significant.
Just 24 hours later Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, will address the annual International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The best three years lie ahead, Mr Ballmer told The Times in a recent interview. The idea is that as fields such as television, computing, music, video, telephony, video gaming and photography mature their digital formats, fewer devices will be needed to store and play content.
Portable devices — the MP3 players, digital cameras and mobile phones of the mid-Noughties — have already merged to become today’s smartphones. At this year’s electronics show we can expect digital convergence to invade our living-rooms. Manufacturers are working on internet-capable television sets that can be switched from broadcast to internet catch-up services such as the BBC iPlayer as easily as changing channels. By the end of the decade, many experts predict, internet TV viewing will overtake broadcast viewing as the primary means of television consumption.
The jury is out on domestic 3D TV, which requires special glasses as well as special sets. It may be revolutionary — but having just replaced their old TV with a flat-screen, consumers may not be keen to fork out for a 3D set.
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