Paul Gluckman

It was a “transformational year” for Dropbox, as the world “abruptly shifted to working from home due to the pandemic,” said CEO Drew Houston on a Q4 call Thursday. “We helped many of our customers through this transition” and “adapted quickly to the new environment ourselves,” reorienting product “to address many of the new challenges and opportunities that distributed work presents,” he said. Revenue for the year increased 15% to $1.91 billion, he said: “We ended 2020 with more than 15 million paying users and 525,000 business teams.” Dropbox experienced a surge in demand during the onset of COVID-19, including “elevated trial starts” that were “mostly isolated to the first half,” said Houston. “Engagement broadly has been up.” Permanent work-from-home rituals in 2021 and beyond “will be a tailwind, given that folks are shifting to distributed work and Dropbox becomes a lot more important when you're working out of the screen,” he said. “We see a lot of opportunity to address new pain points in the virtual work experience. Everybody has a need to keep all their content organized. It's a very fragmented and distracting and overwhelming experience now.”

The ATSC 3.0 Evoca TV service in Boise has been “exercising flash channels a fair amount in our system” since debuting in September (see 2011010001), CEO Todd Achilles told the virtual Streaming Media 2021 Connect conference Thursday. “We set up a flash 4K channel for a sporting event, and we’re actually standing up a flash channel today for the Mars rover landing.” It landed around 4 p.m. EST. The channel capability is in the 3.0 suite to “spin up an extra channel” over-the-air “on demand and dynamically, and spin it down again,” said ATSC President Madeleine Noland: “A flash channel is a channel that pops up for a particular purpose and comes back down again.” Such protocols are in ATSC’s A/351 recommended practice document for 3.0 signaling, delivery and synchronization techniques, said Noland through a spokesperson. An app per the A/344 standards on 3.0 interactive content is used, she said. Achilles thinks 3.0 is superior to 5G for content delivery into the home. “There’s lots of conversations” about how 5G will become “the new technology to deliver video into the home,” he said. “When you look at the numbers on that, it’s still a really expensive way to deliver bits to a stationary end user.”

Analog Devices' communications business generated 18% of Q1 sales, and revenue was down 10% sequentially from Q4 but up 16% year over year, said Chief Financial Officer Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah on a fiscal Q1 investor call Wednesday. Wireless and wireline revenue grew by double digits from the year-earlier quarter, “despite zero revenue from Huawei this quarter” due to the Commerce Department’s export restrictions on the Chinese telecom giant, he said. The chipmaker has said consistently that big U.S. deployment of 5G "is going to be a second-half event,” said Mahendra-Rajah. “Our view on that has not changed. What we have seen is a bit more of a slowdown in China as they’re digesting the 5G that they have deployed and the channel counts are a bit lower.” The company doubts it can grow communications revenue year over year, “given the significant headwind from Huawei going to zero,” said Mahendra-Rajah. “That’s a tough ask."

With COVID-19 vaccines being distributed, many businesses are beginning to prepare for a “hybrid work environment,” with some workers based in the physical office and others working from home for “the foreseeable future,” said RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis on a Q4 call Tuesday. As companies adapt to this new “work from anywhere norm,” digital transformation of business communications will become more critical, with “cloud-based communications solutions” enabling that, he said. “We are increasingly confident in the size of the opportunity.” The company’s annualized recurring revenue in 2020 grew 35% year over year to $1.3 billion, he said.

TCL’s North American smartphone subsidiary became one of the largest importers to join the massive Section 301 litigation when it filed a complaint (in Pacer) Friday in the U.S. Court of International Trade. Like the roughly 3,500 other lawsuits inundating the court, TCT Mobile (US) seeks to get the List 3 and 4A tariffs on Chinese goods vacated and the duties refunded with interest. TCT's claims “accrued with each and every entry of products” with List 3 or 4A tariff exposure, said the company. The action was filed within two years of the date that TCT paid the duties, it said, satisfying the court’s statute of limitations requirement on the timeliness of complaints. “With a mobile handset product portfolio that includes TCL and Alcatel devices,” TCT is “the fourth largest handset manufacturer in North America,” it said. The complaint lists two dozen import categories for which TCT has List 3 or 4A tariff exposure. Most are for capital goods, packaging materials or components, including lithium-ion batteries. Finished smartphones that TCT imports from China under the Harmonized Tariff Schedule’s 8517.12.00 subheading are on List 4B. The Trump administration postponed indefinitely the 15% tariffs on List 4B goods from taking effect in December 2019 after reaching the phase one trade deal with China (see 1912130042).

Launching the Sony Retail Experience store-within-a-store format is among the best moves Sony Electronics North America President Mike Fasulo made, he told us in an exit interview (see personals section, Feb. 4; see also 2102160027). The program originated at Best Buy and has expanded elsewhere. “It gave us a mechanism to actually hear directly from the end user,” Fasulo said. “That’s really hard to do today. If you have a direct business, you’re hearing from consumers every day. But if you go through the channel, as we do, things are filtered.” Sony engineers take "those insights and trends and not only apply it in the U.S., but on a global basis,” Fasulo said.

“CTA pulled off something brilliantly” for CES 2021 that was “so complicated and so compressed in time,” said Sony Electronics North America President Mike Fasulo in an exit interview (see personals section, Feb. 4; see also 2102160026). The CES 2021 content creation “was really well done,” as were “the parameters that CTA set for quality,” said Fasulo. “There was really good promotion around it. We had really, really nice traffic.” On the negative side, Fasulo frowned upon “some issues with user interfaces and user experiences, but this is technology. You’ve got to work out some of those bugs.” Fasulo and other members of the CTA executive board “gave that feedback very clearly” to the CES team, he said. “I’m 150% convinced they’ll rectify that in plenty of time for next year.” CTA didn’t comment Tuesday. He doubts virtual events will render physical shows “obsolete” post-pandemic, nor will the physical CES “go back 100% to the way it was,” he said. “I see the hybrid going forward, which is very exciting.”

The global shortage of semiconductors is “one of the central motivations” for the executive order President Joe Biden will sign “in the coming weeks” to begin a “comprehensive review of supply chains for critical goods,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told a media briefing Thursday. The review will focus on “identifying the immediate actions we can take, from improving the physical production of those items in the U.S. to working with allies to develop a coordinated response to the weaknesses and bottlenecks that are hurting American workers,” she said. The administration is “currently identifying potential choke points in the supply chain and actively working alongside key stakeholders in industry and with our trading partners to do more now,” said Psaki. Her disclosure of a coming EO on the semiconductor shortage came the same day top U.S. chipmakers wrote Biden urging his support for tax credits to fund U.S. manufacturing and R&D (see 2102110023). The Semiconductor Industry Association, which orchestrated the letter to the White House, didn’t comment Friday.

Smartphone market “conditions and visibility” began improving in 2020's second half, as consumers and handset OEMs “adjusted to the new COVID environment,” said Pixelworks CEO Todd DeBonis Q4 call Thursday. It was a “down year” for the handset industry, he said. Global smartphone unit shipments fell 8% from 2019. Pixelworks supplies video processing chips and software to makers of mainstream-priced smartphones. Oppo and TCL are its top customers. Handset OEMs “delayed or canceled numerous planned phone launches” in 2020, said DeBonis. Though the rollout of 5G-enabled smartphones began to gain momentum in the second half of the year, “total 5G units shipped proved to be much lower than was forecast entering 2020,” he said. A “notable trend” during 2020 was the introduction of the first mainstream handsets to feature higher frame rate displays, “coupled with a broader shift by OEMs from LCD to OLED displays due to an increased availability and more competitive pricing,” he said. Pixelworks technology was embedded into 16 handset models from seven OEMs in 2020, compared with six smartphone models launched across four OEMs in 2019, he said. The rollout of 5G phones will become “more pervasive” in 2021, said DeBonis. High-quality video and gaming are “the most obvious applications for leveraging the substantially higher bandwidth and low latency of 5G in mobile devices,” he said. Market data suggests “the global consumer appetite for $1,000-plus phones is shrinking,” he said. “We expect mobile OEMs to aggressively push 5G technology down the cost curve to lower price models.”

Tests show ATSC 3.0 “can provide robust reception of data at all vehicular speeds,” concluded a paper by Sony engineers Luke Fay, Graham Clift and Fred Ansfield. “This field test shows that broadcasters can transmit both high throughput stationary services as well as robust automotive services simultaneously to target a diverse set of receiving devices,” it said. “Delivery of data of any kind (infotainment, software updates, navigation maps, etc.) is robust and reliable.” Automotive field tests Sony conducted in the fall with Pearl TV in Phoenix and News Press & Gazette in Santa Barbara, California, found NextGenTV can be a viable broadcast service for delivery of “robust passenger infotainment” to vehicles and “easily transmit software updates and information to fleets" of vehicles, the company said Wednesday. Prototype Android and Sony devices were involved.