Silicon Labs shares closed up 18 percent at $110.04 Wednesday amid signs the semiconductor industry slump is coming to an end. Executives noted growth in key segments. Q1 bookings were “robust,” signaling a Q2 rebound “despite macro turbulence,” said CEO Tyson Tuttle. Revenue was $188 million, at the midpoint of guidance, compared with $205 million in Q1 2018, the company reported. Sequentially, revenue was down 13 percent due to the “broad slowdown in the semiconductor industry,” said Chief Financial Officer John Hollister. This “should represent the bottom of the downturn,” said Tuttle. “We have not seen material improvements in key macroeconomic conditions, including geopolitical and trade factors” since the January earnings call. Silicon Labs expects Q2 revenue of $202 million-$212 million on sequential growth in its IoT, broadcast and access businesses, with infrastructure “flat.” The company’s Wireless Gecko Series 2 launch was announced Monday. The platform enables “payment-grade” security down to the device level, the chief said. Products on deck are geared to the Bluetooth, Z-Wave and “higher levels of functionality,” he said.
EPA is targeting August for releasing the final version of the first Energy Star specification on smart home energy management systems (SHEMS), said the agency in a Friday stakeholder meeting webcast from CTA's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters. The Draft 1 comment period closes May 3, with Draft 2 scheduled for June, followed by a four-week comment period and the final draft in July. The specification, method and data template will be developed together, it said.
Disney shares closed 12 percent higher at $130.06 Friday following its Thursday investor day event outlining plans for its direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses, including the $69 annual Disney Plus over-the-top video service scheduled for U.S. launch Nov. 12. Disney expects Disney Plus to be profitable by FY 2024 on a 60 million-90 million subscriber count, said Chief Financial Officer Christine McCarthy. Analysts were generally upbeat Friday.
Five-year-old SoundFi, which last week announced its translation app is available for two Viacom Paramount Pictures at some theaters, is talking with other studios about similar arrangements, CEO Chris Anastas told us. The technology, which can translate in up to24 languages, launched on Sony Pictures’ Equalizer 2 last year, appeared in re-release of John Carpenter’s Halloween last fall and in Bumblebee. All were dedicated, recruited screening events, said Anastas.
Sound bars in Samsung's 2019 lineup include the company's SmartThings technology for smart home control and access to music streaming services, said Jim Kiczek, vice president-audio marketing. The sound bars are controllable by Samsung’s Bixby-enabled OneRemote and are compatible with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, he said in a Tuesday presentation. Adapt Sound automatically sets the volume of the audio track for a specific scene, he said, so loud explosions and quiet conversations can be heard, even when the sound bar is at low volume. A game mode engages up-firing speakers to add an immersive experience to gaming, he said. The company pushed aesthetics as much as performance in releasing features and pricing for its lineups.
Excitement about mobile photography innovations is “good news for the smartphone industry,” struggling to surpass “stagnant sales forecasts,” IHS analyst Wayne Lam said. Huawei Tuesday became the first vendor to incorporate a folded optics design that enables lossless optical zoom photography in a smartphone. Lam said Huawei and Samsung are investing heavily in mobile photography improvements, while Apple has “arguably been left behind in the current design cycle.” Other “radical” mobile photography designs are coming to market, including one from Nokia’s (HMD)/Light.co with a five-lens, selectable depth-of-focus camera. “Ultimately, competition breeds better products,” and the next wave to mobile photography, including time-of-flight and other “novel” optical sensors, “should give the industry confidence that smartphone innovations have longer legs than the naysayers have proclaimed,” said the analyst. As for Huawei's future in the U.S. market, Lam said the company's success in Europe "helps limit the immediate impact of pressures the company faces from the United States government. Short term, there doesn't appear to be a solution" to the situation in the U.S., he said, and Huawei will continue to focus on existing businesses.
Spotify continued its push into the podcast market, announcing Tuesday it agreed to buy podcast studio Parcast. Parcast introduced 18 podcast series since starting in 2016, focusing on mystery, crime, science fiction and history, and plans to launch 20 this year. Crime and mystery podcasts are a top genre for Spotify users, said Dawn Ostroff, Spotify chief content officer. The acquisition is expected to close in Q2. Spotify bought two podcast-related companies last month (see 1902060010). Podcasts are the next frontier for streaming music services. On a February earnings call, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said early takeaways from the 14-podcast lineup in the company’s portfolio indicate listeners engage at twice the rate of non-podcast listeners, and users “who wouldn’t have considered Spotify otherwise are now signing up to the platform.”
Apple unveiled subscription streaming video and news services at a Monday event in Cupertino, a venue traditionally known for the company’s splashy hardware debuts. It reversed course this month, launching next-gen iPads, AirPods and an iMac last week in low-key fashion (see 1903210028), saving the glitz for Monday’s highly anticipated service announcement at the Steve Jobs Theater.
Qualcomm is eyeing a smart speaker market pegged at 220 million devices globally by 2020, Rob Saunders, director-product marketing, told us before Tuesday's announcement of a next-generation “smart audio” chipset. The company, he said, is pushing a “clear and obvious interest in voice UI,” or user interface. Interest extends to speakers with displays, cameras and audio products. Voice interface “is here to stay and across a variety of devices,” Saunders said. Music playback is the most requested smart speaker use, in some surveys as much as 70 percent. Immersive audio technology -- Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and Sony’s 360 Reality Audio, based on MPEG-H 3D Audio, launched at CES -- could drive a new wave of audio, said Saunders. The chipsets have Wi-Fi 802.11ax and Bluetooth radios and can support Zigbee devices. Having compute power on the chip lets engineers move some voice and speech recognition and natural language processing from the cloud to the local device for simple commands, said Saunders. That's useful in geographies with poor internet reliability, he said, for backup local control of devices without connectivity.
Spotify “seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem -- including the substantial revenue that they draw from the App Store’s customers -- without making any contributions to that marketplace,” responded Apple Friday about Monday's antitrust complaint to the European Commission (see 1903130064). “They distribute the music you love while making ever-smaller contributions to the artists, musicians and songwriters who create it -- even going so far as to take these creators to court.”