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The different strategies of Apple and Samsung in getting to the point where the two companies now dominate the smartphone market. Whereas Apple makes only one phone, its iPhone, Samsung's strategy is to have multiple phones in each price segment. It has five levels of Android based phones, with 2-3 models in each price segment. Samsung also benefits from doing its own maufacturing. When faced with a number of technologies Samsung's strategy is to bet on all of the technologies until one of them emerges as a winner, and then concentrate resources on that technology. It uses a similiar strategy for televisions. Apple by contrast places more emphasis on original design and profit margins over sales, gaining sales without eroding margins by being the first innovator in the market. It also has its own unique arrangement for manufacturing at lowcost with Foxconn in China that supports its high margins. Apple is secretive about its designs and promotes its brand heavily with its own retail stores. Apple also uses its innovative edge as leverage to steer profits away from carriers. Analyst estimates are that carriers such as AT&T and Verizon pay about $400 per iPhone to subsidize its cost because this is the only way to get customers into their retail stores. IDC estimates are that the smartphone market is $219 billon in 2012. Both companies are very close in volume- IDC estimates Apple shipped 93.2 million smartphones in 2011, compared to Samsung's 94 million units. Apple has market share of 23.5% in the fourth quarter 2012, up from 16% in 2010. Samsung has 22.8%, up from 9.4% in 2010. Apple and Samsung have together taken 91% of operating profits of all cellphone companies in the fourth quarter, an increase of 30% from 2011, according to Strategy Analytics....

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Sharp and Samsung compete to make LCD panels for the new third generation iPad in 2012.

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Angola's recent election gives the country a new president Joao Lourenco. Since independence Angola is governed by the MPLA led by Jose Dos Santos. Lourenco was selected by Dos Santos to help Angola navigate a difficult period when oil prices have fallen. Dos Santos remains a key figure in Angola- his daughter heads the oil company that generates 95% of Angola's export revenues, and his son heads the sovereign wealth fund. Lourenco's wife is an executive director of the World Bank, and helped negotiate a loan from the IMF for $1.4 billion in 2009. Lorenco is a low key figure who started by joining the MPLA in the struggle for independence at the age of 20, and is seen as a person Mr. Santos is appointing as he considers retirement.

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Tony Blair on how far CHina has come and the culture revolution of abetter kind under way.

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Voter fatigue with the Conservatives under prime minister Harper is showing up in the province of Ontario. The area around London, Ontario, and Toronto is critical in the 2015 general election. A large loss of manufacturing jobs has left this key manufacturing region of Canada so weakened that the recent 20% decline in the Canadian currency is not leading to a rebound in the manufacturing sector. The Liberals under Justin Trudeau have promised to run a slight deficit to invest in infrastructure that would help the manufacturing sector, while Harper's Conservatives plan to keep the status quo. The vigorous campaign run by Trudeau, the son of a former prime minister, is also helping the Liberals, who are moving ahead in the polls.

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A former Apple and H-P executive, Jean-Louis Gassee, says the Apotheker decision to exit the PC and tablet business comes from a corrrect evaluation that it is becoming more of a commodity business than ever before, with falling prices and margins. Even a good manager could ony do so much, maybe increase the margins by one or two points, says Mr. Gassee. Apple's profit margins come from its software capabilities and pioneering of new devices that created the kind of demand and exclusivity which other competitors cannot match. Either they had no comparable software capabilities and experience, or lacked the combination of CEO capabilities that Jobs could bring, pioneering software and years of expertise of working with hardware suppliers to create new products.

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Sprint's agreement with Softbank to sell a 70% stake to Softbank for $20.1 billion. Sprint has lagged behind Verizon and At&T in offering Long Term Evolution, or LTE, data service. It is struggling with $21 billion in debt and needs the additional investment to support investment on the next generation technologies. Softbank was working on reducing debt estimated at $13 billion and building its LTE network in Japan. The deal for Sprint Nextel therefore comes as a surprise with the additional debt Softbank is taking on, even though Masayoshi Son, the CEO of Softbank, is known for taking on large deals. Softbank shares declined 17% after the first information came out and have dropped an additional 5%. Sprint shares were up 14%.

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A new study by the City University of New York of the largest retailers in New York city shows retail workers earn $9.50 an hour. Ony 40% of workers were full time, and over 50% were part-time, and the others being temporary workers. Lower work hours worsen the impact of low pay per hour, according to professor Stephanie Luce of the Murphy Institute of the City University of New York, the main author of the study. Only 3 of 10 workers receive health insurance with their jobs. The study is based on interviews of 436 nonunion employees at department stores, electronic stores, clothing stores, bookstores, and other retail stores, and includes stores ranging from Fifth Avenue to the Bronx.

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Revival of the old city of Diriyah in Riyadh province, Saudi Arabia, where Imam Wahhab and Muhammad ibn Saud, the original chief from the Saud family have their origins. With the help of Imam Wahhab, this tribal chief united the Arabian peninsula in 1744, till the fall to the Ottomans in 1818, lasting 74 years. U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt helped set up Ibn Saud of the original Saud family, as monarch of a new Saudi state in 1932, when it was possible for the French, British and Americans to setup states in the Middle East region to protect their interests. Ibn Saud's son is the current King Salman, who plans to set up a museum complex in Diriyah, and visits the place on weekends.

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Keith Bradsher describes the life of one family of migrant workers in China struggling to get their ony daughter through college. Wu Yiebing is a worker in coal mining and his wife Cao works on farms nearby. He has managed to send his daughter Wu Caoying to college. She is a sophomore in college but fears for the future because of the lack of opportunities for new college graduates in China. She also feels the heavy burden as the parents spend half their income to get her through college and have no retirement savings. This is typical of many migrant families in China who see education as the only way for the next generation to have better lives than their parents.

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How the Four Seasons Hotel and Isadore Sharp its founder,who started the hotel chain from the first Four Seasons Moel in aseedy section of Toronto in 1961, operate and run their business. In 2007 Sharp, a son of Polish immigrants, sold the hotel to Bill Gates and Prince Talal for $3.8 billion. The owners own the real estate and the properties are meticulously laid out , and evertying down to the bed sheets and pillows and employees is planned by the Four Seasons company which only runs the properties. In the process almost all the leverage for what gets done is with Four Seasons. Problems in the current environment for owners as Four Seasons will not relax any of the requirements which are costly and reduce margins.

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Malcolm Turnbull is replaed as leader of the Conservative Party by Mr. Morrison, who favors supporting the coal industry and jobs in mining. Climate change politics has played a major role in Australian leadership changes. Failure to pass legislation that would have pulled back greenhouse emissions led to the change replacing Mr. Turnbull as prime minister with Mr. Morrison.

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This is an amazing story of fortitude and resilience not just for Australia but for the world. Not for defeating the Opposition Leader in his parliamentary seat of 24 years on her third try. No, not that. It is her smiling face as she battled the odds, a year into the death of her oldest son to leukemia, a few years after she herself managed to save her son Zac who was in a pram she was moving in a parking lot when hit by a 88 year old who lost control of his car and pinned her. She lost a leg in that accident and saved her son Zac by pushing the pram out of the way just in the nick of time. She has an artificial leg but this has not deterred her, not when she was refused service at a restaurant, and could not find a home in Dickson, Brisbane region which was disability conducive. She is the daughter of Queensland MP Peter Lawlor. She is shown here with her father and her son Zac. She won the seat held by Australia's  Conservatives Opposition leader Peter Dutton in the Brisbane region for 24 years in the Austrlian election won by Labour's Albanese ...

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The Finance Ministers of Germany and France, Wolgang Schauble and Christine Lagarde, support a reprofiling of Greece's debt. This is a form of restructuring of Greek debt under which Greece's private creditors would be expected to take repayment over a longer period. This would help Greece cover its fiscal gaps in 2012 and 2013. Luxembourg premier Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the group of 17 finance ministers of the EU also supports this move. This is opposed by the ECB Executive Board member Jurgen Stark of Germany, Jens Weidmann, Bundesbank President, and Christine Noyer, head of the French central bank. The ECB's view is that there would be contagion effects from a restructuring which would affect Ireland, Portugal and Spain. Creditors such as Societe General bank support this view. The finance ministers have a political constituency and recent elections in Finland and Germany show lack of public support for additional financial support to Greece, Ireland and Portugal. The ECB is pushing for Greece to exhaust all options include privatization and further spending cuts, and for European governments to come up with the money. The ECB position including a threat by ECB officials to stop accepting Greek bonds as collateral for loans is coming under criticism. Sony Kapoor of Brussels think tank Re-Define, says the ECB is following anarrow interest and considering the political opposition has an untenable position- forcing Greeks and the people of the eurozone countries to bear the entire burden of the crisis with no contribution whatsoever from the banks that made the decisions to make these loans. Not even to the point of a milder form of restructuring that reprofiling would accomplish, that extends debt repayments to creditors over a longer period. Krugman and and an editorial this week in the Wall Street Journal also take this view....

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David Brooks who has covered Joe Biden for decades from his time in the U.S. Senate to Vice President under president Obama, says he comes not from an elite tradition of Democrats such as Adlai Stevenson, but that of Harry Truman, for and of the common man- the "average Joe" in American slang.  Strengths Brooks finds in Joe Biden are his emotional transparency, knowing at any time in interactions what Biden is thinking and feeling. The candour in his conversations. Biden is also like Truman in how spirited he is in defending the common man and his interests in the true Democratic tradition of being for the working class and ordinary people, something lost in recent years. Having lost his wife and daughter in a traffic accident when he was first elected to the Senate, also gives Joe Biden a sense of how it feels to go through this experience. He later lost a son to cancer.  Biden is now the front runner for president. Like Truman Biden has faced criticism for speaking his mind, sometimes awkwardly. Yet as David Brooks points out Biden brings some of the qualities of a Harry Truman, at a time when the mood of the nation has changed and the Democratic Party is returning to its roots fighting for the common man. Harry Truman is thought of highly as American president because of the qualities of simplicity, courage, tenacity, and hard work that he brought to the presidency during the war and during the recovery after 1945. Few people are aware of the fact that Harry Truman returned to the small town of Independence, Missouri, after retiring, at a time when there was no presidential pension, and lived a simple life accepting no favors, without any of the trappings of a former president. ...

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It is only appropriate to bring up Aneurin Bevan in 2024 after the pandemic and as ordinary Britons seek to improve health and living standards, and their compatriots in the US also seek a better form of universal health coverage that works to provide better health  for less cost similar to Europe. In 1948 the National Health Services Act was passed into law with Aneurin Bevan having seen it through parliament as a member of the Labour party from Wales. The NHS was operational in July 1948. Clement Attlee summoned Bevan after winning in a landslide in 1948 and asked him to take the Housing and Health Ministry. Bevan was a coal miner's son who then used his skills in parliament to get passage of laws that created one of the most enduring  institutions of modern times. A docudrama by Prince about a visionary Welshman Aneurin Bevan as Health Minister who founded the NHS National Health Service of Britain. Michael Sheen plays Bevan.

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LG Display agreed to settle a price fixing class-action case in the LCD market before the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, for $380 million. Earlier AU Optronics and Toshiba settled for $170 million and $21 million. Samsung agreed to pay $240 million.

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Panasonic's decision to close a plasma television plant in Shanghai. Panasonic is now focussing efforts on new OLED television technologies with four times the resolution of high definition sets. At one point in early 2011 plasma represented 40% of Panasonic television sales, in the current fiscal year ending March 2013 plasma will be down to 16%.