Galaxy phones drive Samsung to record profit again

Samsung, the world's largest technology company by revenue, reported another record-high quarterly profit as customers flocked to Galaxy smartphones, helping it outdo rivals even at a challenging time for the global tech industry.

Samsung Electronics Co. said Friday its net profit swelled to 5.2 trillion won ($4.5 billion) in the April-June quarter, a 48 percent jump from a year earlier.

The earnings were lower than a median forecast of 5.6 trillion won in a poll of seven analysts by Yonhap Infomax, but Samsung shares rose 4.8 percent in Seoul as investors expect its earnings to continue growing strongly.

Samsung, the world's largest maker of mobile phones, televisions and memory chips, benefited from runaway demand for its Android-powered smartphones as rivals including Apple Inc. were yet to release new models.

The robust sales of smartphones such as the company's flagship Galaxy S3 helped Samsung paper over a slowdown in other consumer electronics sectors such as televisions and personal computers that has been painful for its rivals and component suppliers.

Its second quarter operating profit spiked 79 percent over a year earlier to 6.7 trillion won and its revenue rose 21 percent to 47.6 trillion won, matching Samsung's guidance released earlier this month. The operating profit, also at an all-time high, was up 15 percent from the previous quarter.
Despite nagging worries about debt-crippled Europe, analysts are expecting Samsung to achieve a record-high profit in the third quarter when Galaxy S3 sales are expected to reach a peak before Apple unveils its new iPhone, anticipated in October.
"The third quarter is expected to be marginally positive as demand for consumer electronics goods, including smartphones and tablets, remains strong and a stream of new products hit the market. Supply for display panels is also expected to increase, as TV makers prepare for the year-end holiday season," Samsung said in a statement.
In a conference call, Samsung's mobile communications vice president Kim Hyun-joon said growth in global smartphone sales will not be affected by an economic slowdown. Sales of Samsung's smartphones in China increased significantly and the company expects to sustain mobile growth through expansion in emerging markets, he said.
The increase in smartphone sales, the S3 as well as the Galaxy Note, will also boost sales of Samsung's mobile processors, helping the company counter weak demand for computer memory chips, analysts said.
In the second quarter, Samsung's mobile division, which makes smartphones, personal computers and network equipment, contributed 63 percent of Samsung's entire operating profit by generating 4.2 trillion won profit.
Although the company does not release its mobile sales figures, Samsung probably outperformed competitors in the top-end smartphone market, while having a tougher time competing with Chinese brands such as ZTE and Huawei in low-end smartphones, analysts said.
Unlike Apple, which makes a limited number of smartphone models, Samsung boasts a wide range of mobile phones with various screen sizes, designs and price ranges. Industry watcher say Samsung might unveil a new version of the Galaxy Note at a German trade fair in the fall to fend off competition from Apple's new iPhone launch.

Research firm IDC said Samsung shipped 50.2 million smartphones in the April-June quarter, widening its lead over Apple. Apple, which earlier this week reported earnings that fell short of expectations, sold 26 million iPhones in the three month stretch.

The two companies, which together control more than half of the world's smartphone market, are scheduled to meet on July 30 in a San Jose court for a U.S. trial on mobile patents.

An epic legal battle between the two companies started in April 2010 when Apple accused the South Korean firm of copying its iPhone and iPad designs and has expanded to about a dozen lawsuits in North America, Asia and Europe. Samsung in turn accuses Apple of violating its wireless technology patents.

Despite the legal battles, the two companies continue to have a close business relationship. Samsung is a key supplier of mobile processors for Apple's iPhone and iPad and Samsung's component divisions also make display screens and mobile chips for Apple.

Outside the mobile market, Samsung made improvements in flat-screens and TVs but semiconductor profit declined on weak global demand for personal computers.

Tiger Attack At Copenhagen Zoo

One of three Siberian tigers in the enclosure bit the man

A man has died after suffering a tiger bite to the throat at a zoo in Copenhagen, Danish Police have confirmed.

The 21-year-old was discovered dead early this morning by a zookeper.
Police believe he climbed a low wall surrounding the den which contained three Siberian Tigers and entered a moat when inside the enclosure.
He was bitten on the thigh, chest, face and throat.
Lars Borg, a spokesman for the Copenhagen police, said investigators could not rule out suicide.
"He has been in the water and the animals must have seen that and attacked him," Mr Borg said.
Police have not released the man's identity but said he was a foreign national with a Danish residence permit.
Investigators are studying CCTV footage to establish how the man entered the park.
Steffen Straede, manager of the Copenhagen Zoo, said it is the first time in the zoo's 152-year history that such an incident has occured.
"If a person really wants to get in (there), we cannot prevent it from happening," he said.
He also said that there were no plans to reassess its security or to put the tigers down and a psychologist will talk to staff who found the body.
The park opened as usual this morning.

Gina Rinehart: The world's 'richest woman'

The richest woman in the world, according to a respected business magazine, is not Oprah Winfrey, Queen Elizabeth II or L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt. It's a relatively unknown Australian mining magnate. So who exactly is Gina Rinehart? Asked once to sum up her concept of beauty, Gina Rinehart did not point to the pearls that so often adorn her neck. Nor did she rhapsodise about the ochre landscape of her beloved Pilbara, a beautiful, if unforgiving, expanse of land in the northwest corner of Australia. Instead, she spoke of the unlovely commodity that has made her family rich, and the giant holes in the ground from where it came. "Beauty is an iron mine," she famously remarked. When her father, Lang Hancock, discovered one of the world's biggest reserves in the early 1950s, the export of iron ore was banned in Australia because it was deemed such a scarce and finite resource. Gina Rinehart Georgina Hancock born in Perth in 1954, studied in Sydney Father Lang Hancock made huge iron ore discovery in Western Australia before her birth Married lawyer Frank Rinehart in 1983 After father's death in 1992, Gina became executive of the company Widowed with four children Rinehart 'world's richest woman' Tens of thousands of iron ore shipments later, royalty payments from that Pilbara mining field in Western Australia continue to swell her coffers. The Hancocks were not the sole beneficiaries. The multi-billionaire fervently believes that her father's discovery also made Australia prosperous, which partly drives her recent quest for influence, gratitude and respect. It is partly borne of a lifelong sense of grievance - that Australia's traditional east coast elites have not recognised her family's contribution to the country's development, nor the local media. With an estimated net personal wealth of $A29 billion ($US29.3bn, £18.79bn), Rinehart has in recent years gone from being Australia's richest woman to Asia's richest woman to arguably the world's. Australian business magazine BRW has named her the world's wealthiest woman, and Citigroup has also predicted that the 58-year-old businesswoman will soon top the global rich list, with more than $100bn (£64.8bn) of assets to her name. Gina Rinehart is said to make nearly A$600 (£393) a second The royalty stream from that initial discovery - the "rivers of the gold," as it has been called - still contributes to her wealth, but it pales alongside the value attached to her mining interests in Western Australia and Queensland. “Start Quote Whatever I do, the house of Hancock comes first” She hates being called a mining heiress because she considers herself a self-made businesswoman who turned her company around after her father's death in 1992. From a worldwide perspective, her spiralling wealth illustrates the shift in economic activity from the west to the east. From an Australian one, she embodies the shift from the east to the west. Once it was media moguls like the late Kerry Packer who topped the Australian rich lists. Now it is minerals magnates who are profiting from the country's China-fuelled resources boom. Rinehart has set out to become both a magnate and a mogul, which is why she is the subject of so much attention and controversy. Along with her mining interests, she now owns a share of Channel Ten, one of the three major commercial television networks, and has also become the single biggest shareholder in Australia's second largest newspaper group, Fairfax Media, although she reduced the size of that stake last week. The group publishes three of the country's most venerable mastheads - the Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne Age and the Australian Financial Review, and the suspicion among many Fairfax journalists is that she will attempt to turn them into mouthpieces for her right-wing views. The dark joke is that the Sydney Morning Herald might become the Sydney Mining Herald. However, she has not been able to gain seats on the board because of a dispute about her refusal so far to accept the group's declaration of editorial independence.    Her father Lang Hancock was a huge influence on her Her mining company, Hancock Prospecting, is essentially her life. She has few outside interests. She does not go in for the normal trappings of wealth, like art, racehorses or private planes. She is renowned for her 24/7 work regime, and a tunnel-visioned determination. Her personal feuds are the stuff of legend and her long list of adversaries has included her father, his business partner, her first husband, her Filipino mother-in-law, Rose Porteous, and now three of her children.   Rinehart spoke at an anti-tax rally in Perth in 2010 Famously litigious, many of her battles have ended up in court. "Whatever I do, the house of Hancock comes first," she once told a reporter. "Nothing will stand in the way of that." Like her rambunctious father Lang, who railed against the scourge of "Canberra-ism," and "eco-nuts" in the environmental movement, her political views are a blend of conservatism and libertarianism. An early heroine was Britain's Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, whom she met over lunch in 1977. Afterwards, the young Gina took much more care to dress in a business-like fashion, got a new hairdresser and started to wear more make-up. Another intellectual hero was the free-market economist Milton Friedman. One of the reasons she cited for raising her children in the US, aside from her marriage to the Harvard-educated Frank Rinehart, was the hope that they might be taught by Friedman. She is also a climate change sceptic, and close to the British Viscount, Christopher Monckton. On a visit to Perth last July, during which he delivered the Lang Hancock Memorial Lecture, Monckton spoke of Australia's need for an equivalent of Fox News, which could be funded by the "super-rich". Other rich women Christy Walton - widow of John, son of the founder of Wal-Mart, Sam Walton Liliane Bettencourt - daughter of L'Oreal founder Eugene Scheueller Johanna Quandt - third wife of German executive who rescued BMW Oprah Winfrey - television host and media mogul, one of the world's richest self-made women Birgit Rausing - art historian from Sweden inherited packaging firm Tetra Laval after death of husband Rosalia Mera - after dropping out of school to make dresses before her teens, the Spaniard co-founded retail company Inditex, which owns Zara Rinehart was not present at the private meeting, but few doubted the identity of the "super-rich" person whom Monckton had in mind. When a video of his remarks was posted online, it heightened speculation that she was pursuing some kind of Foxification strategy in Australia. I have also been told by one of her associates that she met Rupert Murdoch earlier this year, partly to discuss Fox News. Given that the newspapers published by Rupert Murdoch's Australian arm, News Ltd, boast a 70% share of Australian readership, and that Fairfax has the remaining 30%, the widespread fear is of a conservative duopoly, and an end to editorial pluralism. Rinehart's $A165m (£107m) stake in Channel Ten has already lost more than half its value and Fairfax, which last week announced 1900 job cuts, is not seen as a particularly attractive investment. Like her father, who started two newspapers, the profit motive is not a major consideration. Her investment, it is thought, is about political influence. Besides, the amount of money involved is for her comparatively small. As an associate recently explained to me, she is adopting the same approach that the super-rich use when purchasing luxury yachts or private planes, which is not to invest more than 10% of their wealth. In her ongoing drive for influence, the debate two years ago over the Labor government's plans to hit the mining sector with a super profits tax was a major milestone. Unusually for a woman who has preferred to exert a behind-the-scenes influence, Rinehart led the chant of "axe the tax" at a protest rally in 2010 aimed at the then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Her billionaire activism lent itself to easy caricature. A reporter from the Fairfax-owned WA Today joked that it was possible to hear her gold bracelet jangling "a note-perfect version of 'Money, Money, Money' as she pumped her fist". Within weeks, however, Rudd had been ousted, and his successor, Julia Gillard, immediately announced a climbdown over the mining tax.    Rinehart met the Queen during a royal visit to Perth Just as Rinehart wants influence and gratitude, she is also determined to maintain rigid control of her company. Presently, she is locked in a highly-publicised legal battle with three of her four children over a family trust set up by Lang Hancock for his grandchildren. The trust, which owns a share of her company, was due to settle its assets last September, when Lang's youngest grandchild, Ginia, turned 25. But Rinehart allegedly tried to push back the date that her children could become trustees until 2068. Determined to retain sole control, she warned her children they faced ruin if they refused to bend to her will. "Sign up or be bankrupt tomorrow," she threatened in an email. "The clock is ticking. There is one hour to bankruptcy and financial ruin." Her three eldest children described the manoeuvre as "deceptive, manipulative, hopelessly conflicted and disgraceful". It is not so much about greed. Rinehart offered her three estranged children big payments to go along with her plan. It is more about control. Commentators expect the same aggressive approach with her media strategy. After all, Australia's richest ever person is used to getting her own way.

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What to know before July 9 'Internet doomsday' arrives

Internet users scanning their Twitter feeds or Facebook accounts Sunday might want to add one more quick click to check their computer for malware.
Thousands of people around the country whose computers were infected with the malicious DNSChanger software more than a year ago faced the possibility of not being able to get online after midnight EDT.
At 12:01 a.m. EDT, the FBI planned to shut down the Internet servers set up as a temporary safety net to keep infected computers online for the past eight months. The court order the agency obtained to keep the servers running expired, and it was not renewed.

DNSChanger Working Group

A screenshot of the DNSChanger scanning website, showing a clean bill of health. No software installation is required to run the scan, which can be found at dcwg.org.

The problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of more than 570,000 infected computers around the world. When the FBI went in to take down the hackers late last year, agents realized that if they turned off the malicious servers being used to control the computers, all the victims would lose their Internet service.
In a highly unusual move, the FBI set up the safety net. The bureau brought in a private company to install two clean Internet servers to take over for the malicious servers so that people would not suddenly lose their Internet.
The FBI arranged for a private company to run a website — http://www.dcwg.org — as a place where computer users could go to see if their computer was infected by DNSChanger, and find links to other computer security business sites where they could find fixes for the problem. (If you want a quick check of your computer's status, the FBI-authorized dns-ok.us site is fast — no software is required for the scan.)
From the onset, most victims didn't even know their computers were infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.

How DNSChanger malware works, and what you can do about it

Many computer users don't understand the complex machines they use every day to send email, shop and cruise for information. The cyberworld of viruses, malware, bank fraud and Internet scams is often distant and confusing, and warning messages may go unseen or unheeded.
Also, some people simply don't trust the government, and believe that federal authorities are only trying to spy on them or take over the Internet. Blogs and other Internet forums are riddled with postings warning of the government using the malware as a ploy to breach American citizens' computers. That's a charge the FBI and other cybersecurity experts familiar with the malware quickly denounce as ridiculous.
Still, the Internet is flooded with conspiracy theories:
"I think the FBI just wants everyone to go to that website to check our computers so they can check our computers as well. Just a way to steal data for their own research," one computer user said in a posting on the Internet.
Another observed: "Yet another ploy to get everyone freaked out ... remember Y2K."
There also is an underlying sense that this will be much ado about nothing, such as the approach of 2000. The transition to that year presented technical problems and fears that some computers would stop working because they were not set up for the date change. In the end there were very few problems.
Considering there are millions of Internet users across the country, several thousand isn't a big deal, unless you're one of them.

FBI

Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., and co-founder of Congress' cybersecurity caucus, said computer uses have a responsibility to practice good sense and make sure their computers are not infected or being hijacked by criminals.
"These types of issues are only going to increase as our society relies more and more on the Internet, so it is a reminder that everyone can do their part," he said.
FBI officials have been tracking the number of computers they believe still may be infected by the malware. As of Wednesday, there were about 45,600 in the U.S. — nearly 20,000 less than a week ago. Worldwide, the total is roughly 250,000 infected. The numbers have declined steadily, and recent efforts by Internet service providers may limit the problems on Monday.
Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent, said many Internet providers have plans to try to help their customers. Some may put technical solutions in place that will correct the server problem. It they do, the Internet will work, but the malware will remain on victims' computers and could pose future problems.
Other Internet providers are simply braced for the calls to their help lines.
By Monday, if you can't read this online, those customer support lines will be your only solution.

Facebook and Yahoo settle patent and form ad alliance

Yahoo's original lawsuit was filed shortly before Facebook's stock market listing

Yahoo and Facebook have settled their patent row and formed an advertising alliance.

Yahoo had sued the social network in March claiming 10 of its intellectual properties had been infringed.
Facebook subsequently bought 750 patents from IBM and counter-sued. It later bought hundreds more patents from Microsoft to strengthen its defence.
The firms said they would now cross-license innovations from each other and collaborate on future projects.
Yahoo's u-turn The AllThingsD blog - which broke the news ahead of the official announcement - reported that Yahoo's interim chief executive Ross Levinsohn had begun moves to resolve the dispute immediately after taking over from his ousted predecessor.
It added that Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg soon became involved in the resulting negotiations.
A press release quoted Mr Levinsohn as saying: "We are excited to develop a deeper partnership with Facebook, and I'm grateful to Sheryl and her team for working hard together with our team to develop this dynamic agreement... Combining the premium content and reach of Yahoo as the world's leading digital media company with Facebook provides branded advertisers with unmatched opportunity."
Ms Sandberg added: "Yahoo's new leaders are driven by a renewed focus on innovation and providing great products to users. Together, we can provide users with engaging social experiences while creating value for marketers."
Counting the cost The move may help secure Yahoo's top job for Mr Levinsohn. He had been competing for the role against Hulu's boss Jason Kilar.
But, the video streaming service announced Mr Kilar had "graciously declined" to be considered for the role shortly after news of the patent agreement leaked.
Although no money appears to have exchanged hands, the row has still proven to be expensive.
Facebook had paid Microsoft $550m (£355m) to buy 650 patents and license a further 275. It has not disclosed the cost of its deal with IBM, although the tech site Cnet has suggested the sum was $83m.

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