Samsung Mobile Up, LCD Business Under Pressure

Samsung has published its quarterly results, and overall, the mobile division is lifting the whole company as the LCD business remains under enormous price pressure. Overall, mobile telephony is still a growing segment of the market, with more than 11% growth year over year. Samsung is the #2 just behind Nokia in terms of unit shipped  (70M versus 88M). Nokia is falling fast, and it’s unlikely that the Windows Phone 7 deal will help in the short term – at least in terms of unit shipped.For Samsung, the mobile market is already extremely important and it should continue to drive the company’s earnings, if it can execute on a busy roadmap. Keep in mind that Samsung is tightly vertically integrated, which means that its mobile division is also a huge customer for the display and semiconductor (processors, memory) divisions.

As for the LCD TV business, the market simply shows that this segment has reached a “good enough” point. Many users don’t care enough about the potential design or image quality improvements (which are real) to pay a huge premium on a high-end television. That is why “3D” was so important to TV manufacturers, but as we expected, stereo 3D is simply not good enough to attract the masses. It will need to be glasses-less before it works in a massive way.