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Two years ago it would have been all too easy to write Palm
off. Sales of PDA's were showing signs of weakening and in fact would continue
to nose dive. Things looked pretty grim for the company. Even 12 months ago,
things looked pretty shaky as the company repositioned itself, taking back its
original name from PalmSource and giving itself a corporate makeover in July
last year.
Earlier this year, there were even calls for the company to sell out before the whole house of cards came crashing down.
Now Palm is really hitting its straps again, mostly off the
back of its runaway success the Treo Smartphone devices which have helped its
maintain strong quarterly growth and edging up net income for the fiscal year
2005/2006.
The company has now reported revenues for its fourth quarter,
ended June 2, were US$403.1 million, up 20 percent from the year-ago quarter,
while revenue for the full fiscal year 2006 totalled US$1.6 billion, up 24
percent from its 2005 results. Even gross margin received a kick along growing 7 percentage points.
Ed Colligan, Palm president and chief executive officer
placed the company's good fortune squarely on the Treo. Revenues from its smartphone business were up 85 percent, acording to the results.
"Treo smartphone
sales surpassed an important milestone -- $1 billion in revenue for the fiscal
year," said Colligan.
"Our product engine is firing on all cylinders as
evidenced by our recent introductions of both the Treo 700w and the Treo 700p,
each of which offers a different operating system, 3G radios and robust
application suites, and we delivered these products to multiple carriers simultaneously.
"We enter fiscal year 2007 as a strong leader, capable of
delivering on the rich potential of mobile computing on a global scale," he said.
Though not of iPod proportions, the company managed to ship an
impressive 2.3 million Treo smartphones and 2.5 million Palm handheld computers
- a significant amount of those in the
final quarter.
In Q4 Palm shipped about 623,000 smartphones and 495,000
handhelds pushing the number of PALM devices out in the market to almost 36
million units.
Looking forward, the company said it plans to launch even
more Treo models and to beef up its attack on the European market.
But the company is not out of the woods just yet. Wall Street punished Palm'ss stock after the results were released. Not just because it failed to meet analyst's expectations by 9 percent, but because there's something of a feeling that Palm is about to get splattered by the likes of Research In Motion, Motorola and Nokia.
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