| By Jeremy Geelan |
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| April 22, 2006 01:00 PM EDT |
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18,397 |
Some weeks in any industry seem longer than others; as far as
i-Technology industry goes, the week just ended seemed to last about a month.
How else is one to explain how there can possibly have been room for all that happened, from the return to center-stage of Larry Ellison on the one hand and Nokia on the other, to the rumored separation of Scott McNealy - by his own BoD - from the helm of the good ship Sun Micro? And sixteen other major things besides...
Let us begin at the beginning, with the news from Larry Ellison on Monday - via the Financial Times - that he is determined that Oracle's earnings will one day very soon, if it plays its cards right, hit $10BN. Too ambitious a target, so soon after the fallow post-Bubble period? He thinks not.
"All I care about is that we keep growing our profits every year," he told the UK-based newspaper. "We have a five-year plan to grow our profits at 20 per cent a year. Last year we overshot, we grew at 28 per cent. This year we will grow at 20. We’re growing our profits very, very rapidly," he added matter-of-factly.
Someone who is not growing his profits very rapidly, on the other hand, is Sun's Scott McNealy. The doyen of the i-Technology industry, the longest serving CEO in Silicon Valley, is not - so rumors say - going to have a 23rd year running the company he's steered for 22 years. The helm will pass to his heir apparent, current President and COO Jonathan Schwartz.
McNealy, whose 6-year average compensation has been $13.35M, has been with Sun 24 years. On Monday Sun is set to announce results for the fiscal third quarter on Monday after the closing bell on Wall Street. By the sound of things it may not be the only major company announcement of the day from the Santa Clara, CA-based giant.
Sun's stock has crawled slowly upwards over the last 4 quarters, from $3.50 to $5.0. Nokia shares, on the other hand, have sky-rocketed, helping European stocks have their biggest weekly gain since January. After announcing that first-quarter profit had risen 21 percent from a year earlier on strong sales in North America and Asia, Nokia CEO Jorma Ollila went so far as to predict that the 3G handset market will double in size in 2006 compared with 2005 - which, if it turned out to be true, would push global shipments to just shy of 100 million units, a truly staggering total.
Nokia already sells one in three of all the mobile phones on earth. "The 3G market has really been taking off," Ollila said. "Our investment in 3G is really starting to pay off." Sales nearly doubled in North America - especially for its high-end Nokia N70 imaging phone.
Another high-profile CEO, Google's Eric Schmidt, had cause to celebrate last week too. Google had enjoyed what Schmidt called an "exceptional quarter with strong growth and profitability." More specifically, Google's first-quarter profit rose 60% to $592M (from $372M for Q1 a year ago).
This was also the week in which Microsoft tackled its "MSN problem" (i.e., that of lackluster performance) by hiring asway from 
Ask.com and the man credited with building the management team that orchestrated its turnaround into the second-largest pure search site on the Internet, Steve Berkowitz. He is to become senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Business Group.
"This is an industry in its early years," Berkowitz said in a statement, adding "with so much opportunity and so much yet to be figured out."
"Microsoft has a team of some of the world’s greatest technologists and business leaders who are committed to pushing the boundaries of what is currently thought to be possible. The opportunity to work in the online space for a company like Microsoft, with its vision, capabilities and global reach, is truly exciting."
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