Mobile Phone Insurance News

Orange have announced that they will be coming to the market with a Prepay Black berry - it will be the Pearl 8120 smart phone and will cost £145. 

Naturally you’ll be able to get yours covered with insurance2go.co.uk

There is mounting speculation that Skype, the internet telephony system, might be sold off by eBay possibly to a Mobile Communications company or to Google.

EBay have long ago admitted that they overpaid for Skype when they puchased it a few years ago finding it difficult to generate significant revenues from the services that has millions of users taking advantage of the free PC to PC but far fewer making paid for calls to landlines of mobiles.

Nokia have reported a 69% drop in it’s 4th quarter profits to £702 million. The profit drop has been atributed to a decrease in handset sales. Its shares in Helsinki droped by 6.84% on the news.

LG the manufacturer of Mobile Phones and flat screen TVs reported its first net loss in seven quarters. The reason given is due to the falling prices of TVs.

The price Telefonica charges its rivals for renting space on underwater cables from the mainland to the Spanish islands will soon be regulated. This will enable its competitors to compete more sharply in these markets and eventually enable the people of these islands to search aound for better deals offered by Telefonica’s rivals.

Nokia siemens Networks have said that they are benefitting from companies wishing to outsource telecoms services as economies weaken.

The company behind SpinVox, the service that turns voicemails into text messages are set to launch Voxlinks, a new service, that allows users to speak their text messages rather than using the type pad to type out the messages. Not a bad idea, although the name is rubbish.

Is it 1005 accurate? We a spokes person says:

 ”We’ll never be 100% accurate but the accuracy goes up as it is used because if the computer doesn’t know a word it asks for help and there are agents on hand to help the system learn.”

The BBC News website has reported that the economic downturn may tempt people to risk buying stolen goods.

Gwent Police said it had noticed a rise in thefts from cars in the run-up to Christmas and was concerned people may be led into making dodgy purchases.

The force is urging people to register valuables on a website so items stolen could be returned to them more easily.

It is also targeting car criminals with more patrols, “capture cars” and number plate recognition camera equipment.

Community Safety Inspector Terry Davies said:

We are concerned that the credit crunch may be leading more people to risk buying dodgy goods which could have been stolen, to save money.

Our guess is that with the type of stuff being stolen, there may be more people inclined to buy cheaper goods and perhaps ask less questions than before.

We know that lot of sat nav sytems are being stolen. They are becoming almost a necessary item to own.

What we feel is that because so many items of this type of property is being stolen, there must be more than usual market for them.

T-Mobile’s Managing Director is to leave the company in March and will take up a new position with Ntelos, the American Communications provider as president and COO. He joined T-Mobile UK from their US division in 2006.

Steve Jobs the CE of Apple has stepped down over health fears. He is fighting a “hormone imbalance” that has made him lose weight rapidly and is proving to be more complicated than originally thought.

We wish him all the best and hope for a speedy recovery.

Emirates Telecommunications are heading a consortium that will invest at least a $1 billion in a new Mobile Phone network in Iran. the country confirmed earlier in the week that the company had won the international tender for the country’s third mobile phone licence.

Orascom Telecom the Egyptian group and Zain the Kuwati operator have won contracts to operate MTC Touch and Alfa, Lebanon’s two mobile phone networks. The move it a temporary measure while the government waits for markets conditions to improve before full privatisation.

Ericsson, one of the largest Swedish companies, is a leading provider of telecommunication and data communication systems, and related services covering a range of technologies, including especially mobile neworks. Directly and through subsidiaries, it also has a major role in mobile devices and cable TV and IPTV systems.

Founded in 1876 as a telegraph equipment repair shop by Lars Magnus Ericsson, it was incorporated on August 18, 1918. Headquartered in Kista, Stockholm Municipality, since 2003, LM Ericsson is considered part of the so-called “Wireless Valley“. Since the mid 1990s, Ericsson’s extensive presence in Stockholm helped transform the capital into one of Europe’s hubs of information technology research. Ericsson has offices and operations in more than 150 countries, with more than 20,000 staff in Sweden, and significant presences also in, for example, China, the UK, the USA, Finland, Ireland, and Brazil.

In the early 20th century, Ericsson dominated the world market for manual telephone exchanges but was late to introduce automatic equipment. The world’s largest ever manual telephone exchange, serving 60,000 lines, was installed by Ericsson in Moscow in 1916. Throughout the 1990s, Ericsson held a 35-40% market share of installed cellular telephone systems. Like most of the telecommunications industry, LM Ericsson suffered heavy losses after the telecommunications crash in the early 2000s, and had to fire tens of thousands of staff worldwide in an attempt to manage the financial situation, returning to profit by the mid 2000s.

In 2001 the handsets division formed of a joint venture with Sony called Sony Ericsson. LM Ericsson is now a major provider of handset cores and an infrastructure supplier for all major wireless technologies. It has played an important global role in modernizing existing copper lines to offer broadband services and has actively grown a new line of business in the professional services area.

On 18 February 2008, it was announced that Aastra Technologies would acquire the enterprise PBX division of Ericsson.^[3]

Lars Magnus Ericsson began his association with telephones in his youth as an instrument maker. He worked for a firm which made telegraph equipment for Swedish firm Telegrafverket. In 1876, aged 30, he started a telegraph repair shop with help from his friend Carl Johan Andersson. The shop was in central Stockholm (No. 15 on Drottninggatan, the principal shopping street) and repaired foreign-made telephones. In 1878 Ericsson began making and selling his own telephone equipment. His phones were not technically innovative, as most of the inventions had already been made in the US. In 1878, he made an agreement to supply telephones and switchboards to Sweden’s first telecom operating company, Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag.

Also in 1878, local telephone importer Numa Peterson hired Ericsson to adjust some telephones from the Bell company. This inspired him to buy a number of Siemens telephones and analyze the technology further. (Ericsson had had a scholarship at Siemens a few years earlier.) Through his firm’s repair work for Telegrafverket and Swedish Railways, he was familiar with Bell and Siemens Halske telephones. He improved these designs to produce a higher quality instrument. These were used by new telephone companies, such as Rikstelefon, to provide cheaper service than the Bell Group. He had no patent or royalty problems, as Bell had not patented their inventions in Scandinavia. His training as an instrument maker was reflected in the high standard of finish and the ornate design which made Ericsson phones of this period so attractive to collectors. At the end of the year he started to manufacture telephones of his own, much in the image of the Siemens telephones, and the first product was finished in 1879.

With its reputation established, Ericsson became a major supplier of telephone equipment to Scandinavia. Because its factory could not keep up with demand, work such as joinery and metal-plating was contracted out. Much of its raw materials were imported, so in the following decades Ericsson bought into a number of firms to ensure supplies of essentials like brass, wire, ebonite and magnet steel. Much of the walnut used for cabinets was imported from the US.

As Stockholm’s telephone network expanded rapidly that year, the company reformed into a telephone manufacturing company. But when Bell bought the biggest telephone network in Stockholm, it only allowed its own telephones to be used with it. So Ericsson’s equipment sold mainly to free telephone associations in the Swedish countryside and in the other Nordic countries.

The high prices of Bell equipment and services led Henrik Tore Cedergren to form an independent telephone company in 1883 called Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag. As Bell would not deliver equipment to competitors, he formed a pact with Ericsson, which was to supply the equipment for his new telephone network. In 1918 the companies were merged into Allmänna Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson.

In 1884, a multiple-switchboard manual telephone exchange was more or less copied from a design by C. E. Scribner at Western Electric. This was legal, as the device was not patented in Sweden, although in the US it held patent 529421 since 1879. A single switchboard could handle up to 10,000 lines. The following year, LM Ericsson and Cedergren toured the US, visiting several telephone exchange stations to gather “inspiration”. They found that US engineers were well ahead in switchboard design but Ericsson telephones were as good as any available.

In 1884, a technician named Anton Avén at Stockholms Allänna Telefonaktiebolag had combined the earpiece and the mouthpiece of a (by then) standard telephone into a handset. It was used by operators in the exchanges that needed to have one hand free when talking to their customers. Ericsson picked up this invention and incorporated it into Ericsson products, beginning with a telephone named The Dachshund.

As production grew in the late 1890s, and the Swedish market seemed to be reaching saturation, Ericsson was able to expand into foreign markets through a number of agents. Britain and Russia were early markets. This eventually led to the establishment of factories in these countries. This was partly to improve chances of gaining local contracts, and partly because the Swedish factory could not keep up supply. In Britain, the National Telephone Company had been supplied with Ericsson equipment for some time and was a major customer. By 1897, Britain was accounting for 28% of Ericsson’s sales. Other Nordic countries had become Ericsson customers as well, spurred by the rapid growth of telephone services in Sweden.

Other countries and colonies were exposed to Ericsson products through the influence of their parent countries. These included Australia and New Zealand, which by the late 1890s were Ericssons’s largest non-European market. With mass production techniques now firmly established, the phones were losing some of their ornate finish and decoration.

Despite their successes elsewhere, Ericsson did not make significant sales into the United States. The Bell Group and local companies like Kellogg and Automatic Electric had this market tied up. Ericssons eventually sold its US assets. In contrast, sales in Mexico were good and led to further development into South American countries. South Africa and China were also generating significant sales. With his company now multinational, and growing strongly, Lars Ericsson stepped down from the company in 1901.

In a curious oversight, Ericsson ignored the growth of automatic telephony in the US. Instead it concentrated on squeezing the most sales out of manual exchange designs. By 1910, this weakness was becoming seriously apparent, and the company spent the years up to 1920 correcting the situation. Their first dial phone was produced in 1921, although sales of the early automatic switching systems were slow until the equipment had proved itself on the world’s markets. Phones of this period were characterised by a simpler design and finish, and many of the early automatic desk phones in Ericsson’s catalogues were simply the proven magneto styles with a dial stuck on the front and appropriate changes to the electronics. A concession to style was in the elaborate decals (transfers) that decorated the cases. These phones have been also highly collectable and attractive.

World War I, the subsequent Great Depression, and the loss of its Russian assets after the Revolution slowed the company’s development and restricted its sales to countries such as Australia.

The purchase of other related companies put pressure on Ericsson’s finances, and in 1925, Karl Fredric Wincrantz took control of the company by acquiring the majority of the shares. Wincrantz was partly funded by Ivar Kreuger, an international financier. The company was renamed Telefon AB LM Ericsson. At this time, Kreuger started showing interest in the company, being a major owner of Wincrantz holding companies.

In 1928, Ericsson began its long tradition of “A” and “B” shares, where an “A” share has 1000 votes against a “B” share. Wincrantz controlled the company by having only a few “A” shares, not a majority of the shares. By issuing a lot of “B” shares, much more money was fed to the company, while maintaining the status quo of power distribution.

In 1930, a second issue of “B”-shares took place, and Kreuger gained majority control of the company with a mixture of “A” and “B” shares. He bought these shares with money lent by LM Ericsson, with security given in German state bonds. He then took a large loan for his own company Kreuger & Toll from ITT Corporation (administered by Sosthenes Behn), giving large parts of LM Ericsson as security, and used its assets and name in a series of doubtful international financial dealings that had little to do with telephony.

Financially weakened, Ericsson was now being seen as a take over target by ITT, its main international competitor. In 1931 ITT acquired from Kreuger enough shares to have a majority interest in Ericsson. This news was not made public for some time. There was a government imposed limit on foreign shareholdings in Swedish companies, so for the time being the shares were still listed in Kreuger’s name. Kreuger in return was to gain shares in ITT. He stood to make a profit of $11 million on the deal. When ITT’s Behn wanted to cancel this deal in 1932, he discovered that there was no money left in the company, just a large claim on the same Kreuger & Toll that Kreuger had himself lent money to. Kreuger had effectively bought LM Ericsson with its own money.

With Kreuger no longer in control, the company’s shaky financial position became quickly evident. Kreuger had been using the company as security for loans, and despite his profits, was unable to repay these loans. Ericsson found that they had invested in some very doubtful share deals, whose the probable losses were significant. ITT examined the deal and found that it had been misled quite seriously about the Ericsson’s value. It summoned Kreuger to New York City for a conference, but Kreuger had a “breakdown”. As word of Kreuger’s financial position spread, pressure was put on him by the banking institutions to provide security for his loans. ITT cancelled the deal to buy Ericsson shares. Kreuger could not repay the $11 million, and committed suicide in Paris in 1932. ITT owned one third of Ericsson, but was forbidden to exercise this ownership because of a paragraph in the articles of association stating that no foreign investor was allowed to control more than 20% of the votes.

Ericsson, a basically stable and profitable company, was only saved from bankruptcy and closure with help of loyal banks and some government backing. Marcus Wallenberg Jr negotiated a deal with several Swedish banks to rebuild Ericsson financially. Some of those were Stockholms Enskilda Bank (after a later merger part of the present Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken) and other Swedish investment banks controlled by the Wallenberg family. Then gradually increased their possession of LM Ericsson “A” shares, with ITT still being the single largest owner. In 1960 the Wallenberg family struck a deal with ITT to buy its shares in Ericsson, and has since controlled the company, under the “Wallenberg sphere”.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the world telephone markets were being organised and stabilized by many governments. The fragmented town-by-town systems which had grown up over the years, serviced by many small private companies, were integrated and offered for lease to a single company. Ericsson managed to obtain some leases, which was vital to the company as it represented further sales of equipment to the growing networks. The other large telephone companies, of course, had exactly the same goal. Ericsson managed to get almost one third of its sales under the control of its telephone operating companies.

There were a number of negotiations between the major telephone companies aimed at dividing up the world between them, but the sheer size of the ITT empire made it hard to compete with. With its financial problems, Ericsson was forced to reduce its involvement in telephone operating companies and go back to what it did best, manufacturing telephones and switchgear. It could do this easily now, thanks to its overseas manufacturing facilities and its associated supply companies. These had not been involved in the previous shady financial dealings and were generally in a sound position. The Beeston factory in Britain became a very useful asset here. It had been a joint venture between Ericsson and the National Telephone Company. The factory built automatic switching equipment for the BPO under license from Strowger, and exported a large amount of product to former colonies like South Africa and Australia. The British government divided its equipment contracts between competing manufacturers, but Ericsson’s presence and manufacturing facilities in Britain allowed it to get most of the contracts. Ericsson equipment maintained its reputation for quality.

Sales drives resumed after the Great Depression, but the company never achieved the market penetration that it had at the turn of the century. Although it still produced a full range of phones, switching equipment was becoming a more important part of its range. The distinctive Ericsson styles soon became subdued by the increasing use of moulded thermoplastic phones (Bakelite) etc. 

Source Wikipedia.