Motorola, Philips, Plantronics and Logitech CEOs Discuss the Apple Effect

The consumer electronics world is dividing between those whose business benefits from Apple (AAPL) and those who lose from it. Guess who's on which side? Interesting quotes from CEOs and CFOs on recent earnings conference calls, discussing their companies and markets:

Motorola CEO Ed Zander:

In Q3 we were short a little on revenue, but we hit our profit targets and we struggled with ASP. We did not have the products, frankly, in Q4. I think Q4 was a little more, perhaps internally, some of the things we did as opposed to the market.

We moved, as I said earlier, some of our bread and butter products into a new price point and it worked. And even in the United States, if you were sitting around for Christmas, the ads that were playing on TV were about RAZRs and it seems like every young person and people that couldn't afford RAZRs wanted one and we sold a bucket of them and we're making money on them, butut some of the newer products that came in started ramping in the quarter and we had some mix issues with that.

We also saw some of the emerging market geographies take off and we did not forecast properly what happened. You get off a little bit on this thing and it can multiply very quickly. We are now starting to ship 3G products. We did announce music products, as I said earlier, late in the quarter and right here in January in some of the marketplaces that really want music over the air such as Japan, Korea, and some of the other places around the world and we expect this to start rectifying itself in the next couple of quarters as we introduce some rich experience products.

There is, as you can see even from some of our competitors that announced this week, an opportunity for margin, an opportunity for profit, especially with 3G and rich experiences. We just need to get our product line better in this area. Without preannouncing anything, I think we have some products in this space.

See the full Motorola conference call transcript.

Koninklijke Philips Electronics CFO Pierre-Jean Sivignon:

We are very pleased with Consumer Electronics being within a whisker of achieving its margin target in what was a very difficult year. We have almost completed the cleaning up of the activities in corporate investments and we are well set to achieve our 2007 EBITDA target of above 7.5%. As a consequence of all this and the increasingly changing nature of the company, we are substantially increasing our dividend from €0.44 per share to €0.60 per share... Sales in CE on a comparable basis declined by 4%. However there was continuing growth in connected displays and peripheral and accessories. The margin in the quarter was 7.9% at CE which gives an annual EBIT of 3.9%, which is an excellent performance in a difficult year. We are expecting to achieve our EBITDA target for 2007 but expect the year to have a difficult start.

See the full Philips Electronics conference call transcript.

Plantronics CEO Ken Kannappan:

Earlier this month, I was at the 2007 Consumer Electronics show. It was far and away Plantronics' best ever. Our mobile and B2B product road maps, our products, and our marketing programs received very positive endorsements from our customers. The strength of our portfolio was noted with six Best of CES Design Innovation Awards, including one for Altec; and our Discovery 665 won Best in Show from the Bluetooth SIG. The Discovery 665 combines elegance and performance with our proprietary audio IQ BSB technology. It cuts background sound substantially and also improves transmit clarity.

As previously mentioned, our Altec product announcements were also well received, with particular recognition received from the IM812 wireless home speaker system for the iPod. In addition, Altec benefited from something that didn't happen at CES. As Apple announced the iPhone, we had just finished launching the T515 with Cingular to meet their requirements for a Bluetooth music speakerphone without knowing exactly why.

See the full Plantronics conference call transcript.

Logitech CEO Guerrino De Luca

It was an outstanding quarter for our retail audio business, delivering 27% growth over what had been our largest quarter ever for retail audio. This demonstrates the continued consumer appetite for our iPod and PC speakers that enhance the digital music experience. Despite the delayed launch of our flagship iPod speaker, the $299 Logitech Audio Station, we were still able to more than double our sales of iPod speakers compared to the prior year. Our best ever quarter for PC headsets is a strong signal that we're taking advantage of the rapidly growing popularity of VoIP.

...With notebook PCs growing in popularity, we continue to successfully expand our lineup of peripherals targeted at notebook users. Our retail sales of notebook peripherals such as mice, webcams and speakers grew by 53% in the third quarter. Our most recent offering in the category, the Logitech Alto, is our first combination keyboard and notebook stand designed to enhance the user experience by embracing the notebook form factor while providing a full-sized keyboard, a USB hub and raising the monitor to a more comfortable viewing height.

See the full Logitech conference call transcript.