Five Companies That Dropped The Ball This Week

Nokia Takes $1.8 Billion Q1 Gut-Punch, Admits Lumia Sales 'Mixed'

The bad news just keeps coming for Nokia, as the troubled Finnish mobile device maker reported a $1.8 billion loss in its fiscal first quarter.

"We were clearly disappointed with our performance in Q1 2012," said Nokia CEO Stephen Elop during a conference call Thursday announcing the results.

That's not all: Nokia's Lumia 900 smartphone, the Windows Phone device that was supposed to show the world the wisdom behind the Microsoft-Nokia partnership, hasn't been selling as well as expected.

"Doubling the number of Lumia devices sold quarter on quarter is a respectable pace; however, the sales results have been mixed," Elop said on the call.

New York Slaps Sprint With $300 Million Lawsuit For Not Paying Taxes

New York's attorney general is suing Sprint, the No. 3 U.S. carrier, for not paying sales taxes on mobile services for seven years. That's right, seven years. And that gaffe reportedly cost state and local governments in excess of $100 million, according to a report from Bloomberg this week.

New York is seeking three times that figure in the lawsuit, which Sprint has indicated it will fight.

Qualcomm Says It Can't Keep Up With Smartphone Chip Demand

Mobile chip market leader Qualcomm this week warned it would be unable to meet demand for processors that power the iPhone and other smartphones, and that this would dent its revenue. "At this stage we cannot secure enough supply to meet the increasing demand we are experiencing," Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said in a press conference this week, as reported by Reuters.

Qualcomm doesn’t expect the situation to improve until December, and the resulting need to look for alternatives is expected to raise the company's operating costs. This news was predictably received by investors, and Qualcomm shares dipped 3 percent in the wake of the announcement.

Google Gmail Outage Affects 30 Million Users

Gmail claims somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 million active users so when Google acknowledged that a Gmail outage this week impacted less than 10 percent of the Google Mail users who tried to access their accounts, it did not seem to take more than 30 million potentially frustrated users into account in its bulletin describing the event. Google initially said that less than 2 percent of users were affected.

Hey, it's a free service, and you get what you pay for, but 30 million is a pretty significant number of users for any company to simultaneously anger.

AMD Reports $590 Million Loss In First Quarter

AMD said it exceeded expectations in its fiscal first quarter, but a $703 million charge tied to changes in its dealings with Globalfoundries, its former manufacturing unit, sent the chip maker to a $590 million loss during the period. While not unexpected, this is not the sort of news that a company chasing an entrenched competitor like Intel wants to hear.

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