Portable Multimedia: ST-Ericsson finally gets some traction

Some interesting snippets from ST-Ericsson's results, with its NovaThor U9500 platform being used by HTC. This is in the context of continuing large losses of $594m for the quarter, mainly from operating costs.

China Mobile and HTC launched the HTC Sensation Z710t in September, the first smartphone based on ST-Ericsson's powerful new NovaThor platform.
Lenovo's new Android-based ThinkPad(TM) tablet features Ericsson's mobile broadband modules, based on ST-Ericsson's Thor HSPA+ 21Mbps modem.
Panasonic launched a smartphone based on ST-Ericsson's Thor thin modem. Panasonic also announced that additional smartphones based on ST-Ericsson's Thor HSPA+ 21Mbps thin modems will be available by the end of the year.

"Sales in the third quarter came in slightly ahead of expectations, even when excluding $20 million of revenue from IP licensing to a third party," said Gilles Delfassy, president and CEO of ST-Ericsson. "Revenue from new products continued to grow, making up more than half of our total sales. We continue to make progress on having more devices in the market with ST-Ericsson inside. The first smartphone using one of our NovaThor platforms has ramped in the market - the HTC Sensation Z710t for China Mobile. There are also several new smartphone models in the market based on our Thor modem technology. Our financial performance continues to be challenging, but in addition to growing sales from new products, we're on plan to execute the cost-saving measures announced in June, and we continue to make improvements within our organization to achieve greater efficiencies"

The U9500 NovaThor (below) is based around an ARM dual Cortex-A9 processor with dual multimedia DSP for low-power, flexible media processing, high-bandwidth LP-DDR2 interface and ARM Mali 400 GPU and NEON CPU extensions. It supports: