Earnings Call Excerpt
Ericsson (ERICY)
Q4 2005 Earnings Conference Call
January 31st 2006, 8:00 AM.
Executives:
Gary Pinkham, Vice President, Investor Relations
Carl-Henric Svanberg, President and Chief Executive Officer
Karl-Henrik Sundstrom, Chief Financial Officer
Analysts:
Kulbinder Garcha, Credit Suisse First Boston
Tim Luke, Lehman Brothers
Peter Dionisio, Morgan Stanley
Hasnain Malik, Smith Barney Citigroup
Tim Long, Banc of America
Tim Boddy, Goldman Sachs
Jeffrey Schlesinger, UBS Warburg
Per Lindberg, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein
Avi Silver, Bear, Stearns Inc
Edward Snyder, Charter Equity Research
Jan Dworksi, Handelsbanken
Ed Bell, Cazenove
Richard Windsor, Nomura International
Mats Nystrom, Enskilda Securities
Paul Sagawa, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Inc
Presentation
Operator
Welcome to the Ericsson’s Analysts and Media conference call for their fourth quarter report for 2006. To view visual aids for this call please log on to www.ericsson.com/press or www.ericsson.com/investors. Operator Instructions. Mr. Gary Pinkham, Vice President, Investor Relations, will now open the call.
Gary Pinkham, Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you Operator and hello everyone. And welcome to our conference call for the fourth quarter of 2005. With me here in Stockholm are our CEO, Carl-Henric Svanberg, and Karl-Henrik Sundstrom, our Chief Financial Officer.
Before we get started I’d like to remind you that we will be making forward-looking statements during the call today. And these statements are based on our current expectations and certain planning assumptions. And, as you know, the actual results may be different due to a number of factors. And we encourage you to read our Annual Report to understand what these various factors may be. With that out of the way, I would like to hand over to our CEO, Carl-Henric, for comments about our performance and plans going forward. Carl-Henric?
Carl-Henric Svanberg, President and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. Let me start by saying that last year was a great year for our entire industry. We had 450m new mobile subscribers in the world. And that brings the total number of subscribers to 2.2b, which is a very impressive number I would say, and far beyond what we thought a few years ago. And we do realize that we’ll soon be at 3b and every second individual in the world will have a phone. And I would think that it’s probably, the mobile phone has become the device that have had a more, biggest impact on people’s lives of any product of that kind.
Some 800m new phones were sold. And the mobile phone is now becoming much more than just voice. It is, we have music. We have TV. We have our mobile offices and all of these new features. So, but, and if we look at Ericsson, we had a very good year, an inspiring year with a record profit, the strongest in our history, strong growth and also strong cash flow. And we will come back and comment on the cash flow in particular in the fourth quarter. We have gained market share in basically every area. And, of course, our global presence where we have been in almost all the 140 markets for, not maybe all of them for 100 years, but for a lot of them for 100 years. And our operational excellence continues relentless, to make sure that there is no calorie wasted in any of our workflows or processes. And that is important to support our financial result going forward. And then also the technology leadership, where this year are really clearly ahead of the competition on HSDPA, where we bring 3G technology to another level. But also, in other areas like IMS or Softswitch, which is more of the next generation network’s products and technologies.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
