Palm (PALM) Bites The Dust As Yield-Per-Phone Collapses

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Things were supposed to be bad at Palm (PALM), but, based on earnings, they were even worse.

The firm, which has products which compete with the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and RIM (RIMM) Blackberry, among others, posted a loss of $41 million on revenue of $296 million. For the quarter ending May 31 a year ago, the numbers were much better. Revenue was $410 million and the company had a $17 million net profit.

According to the company "Smartphone sell-through for the quarter reached a record high, totaling 968,000 units, up 29 percent year over year." That means the price that Palm got for each phone was awful.

Cash and short-term investments were $258 million at the end of the quarter compared to $546 million at the end of the period a year ago.

The market did not much like the news. Shares were down almost 8% after hours to $6.01.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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