ST-Ericsson might not have the same brand recognition that Qualcomm, NVIDIA, or Texas Instruments has, but that’s due to change in the future. According to the company’s Q1 2011 financial results revenues hit $444 million, down from $666 million in the same quarter a year ago; that has lead to net a loss of $178 million. “Revenue in the first quarter reflected normal seasonal trends but declined more than anticipated on a sequential basis due to a steeper drop in sales of our legacy products, which is not yet offset by sales of new products. Primarily due to these lower sales, our adjusted operating loss increased sequentially,” said Gilles Delfassy, CEO of ST-Ericsson. This is where things get better though: “However, revenue from new products as a percentage of the total revenue grew again this quarter driven, for example, by sales of our high-speed Thor 21 megabits per second (Mbps) thin modems, which nearly doubled sequentially. We’ve also made further inroads with customers on our NovaThor family of products including the U8500 platform, which is on track. In the midst of these financial results, our main focus remains on improving efficiency and securing the successful execution and delivery of our new products to customers, which will drive the long term success of the company. And I am pleased to say that seven of the top nine device manufacturers by revenue are actively engaged with us here.”
The Thor modem Gilles referred to earlier is already in one product you may have heard of, the T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S 4G, the smartphone that T-Mobile used in a campaign that said that if your iPhone can top the download speeds of, they’ll give you $1,000. As for their U8500, it’s a dual core beast that packs two 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex A9 processors, a Mali 400 GPU that does 30 million triangles per second, and it also features an HSPA+ modem. If that’s coming in products from 7 of the top 9 handset vendors … the second half of 2011 is going to be rather fun.