A new player is about to join the smartphone free-for-all fracas -- but it's not immediately clear how investors like you and me can profit from it.
You've heard all about Google
What we do know is that Deutsche Telekom's
The T-Mobile G1 will hardly move the needle for most of these guys, at least not at first. Google, Qualcomm, and DT are all massive multinational companies with between $10 billion (Qualcomm) and $83 billion (Deutsche Telekom) in annual sales. It takes a lot of smartphones to make any significant difference to numbers like that. Besides, Google doesn't seem too keen on collecting cash from its contributions directly. Mountain View has more devious designs in mind here.
Synaptics is a whole nother story. With only $361 million in trailing sales, the potentially high-margin touchscreen component could quickly add up to serious improvements for this little guy.
And if you look up the Handset Alliance member roster, you'll see that all four of these companies are officially on board. It's not a big stretch to imagine that some of the other hardware and software providers on that list will turn up inside the G1 as well:
Company |
Specialty |
Market Cap (millions) |
Annual Sales (millions) |
CAPS Rating |
---|---|---|---|---|
Marvell Technology |
Communications chips |
$4,290 |
$2,895 |
**** |
Nuance Communications |
Speech and handwriting recognition software |
$2,219 |
$602 |
**** |
SiRF Technology Holdings |
GPS chips |
$64.8 |
$329 |
*** |
Source: Capital IQ.
I believe that the G1 will be a hit, because Google wouldn't have it any other way. But if you really want to profit from this new gadget right away, you would probably be better off making some educated guesses and investing in one of the little guys.
Further Foolishness: