Other sectors
Moving away from semiconductors, the world's biggest mobile phone handset maker - Nokia - announced yesterday and its results were relatively poor.
It posted net sales of €9.8 billion, which was down 20 percent year on year. It sold 108.5 million mobile phone handsets, which was down eight percent year-on-year but still allowed Nokia to maintain its total mobile devices market share of 38 percent.
A big write-off from the value of its Nokia Siemens Networks division contributed to Nokia posting a loss for the quarter, but it has yet to prove that it can adequately protect its market dominance in the face of massive competition in the all-important smartphone market.
Things seem to be a bit easier in the IT services market, with IBM posting solid results, including a net income of $3.2 billion. And the Internet advertising market has clearly cheered-up significantly if Google's record net income of $1.64 billion - a 27 percent year-on-year increase.
On the whole things look pretty positive. Demand has apparently returned to the IT sector, and it looks like businesses are starting to spend money again. With many macroeconomic factors still far from ideal, everyone will remain wary of a double dip recession, but the tech sector at least seems to be recovering nicely.
