On one hand, the company posted impressive growth in its TV, cable and movie businesses. These segments resulted in a $210 million year-over-year quarterly earnings increase and adjusted earnings per share of $0.39 which is better than the $0.34 analysts had predicted.

At the same time, the company announced a 43 percent decline in its publishing business and a quarterly charge of $87 million related to the UK phone hacking settlement.

On an afternoon earnings call, News Corp executives said that about 85 percent of the charge was for lawyers and advisers and the rest for legal settlements. They added that they could not go into details about future settlements but that the “priority is to make this right.” The company says it spent $104 million in 2011 on costs related to the investigation.

The hacking-related charges were not included in the publishing category where the company’s UK and Australia newspapers are experiencing collapsing revenues. The company also said it expected income from its UK newspapers to drop $150 million in the coming year.

Publishing reported second quarter segment operating income of $218 million, a $162 million or 43% decrease compared to the $380 million reported a year ago, reflecting lower advertising revenues at the Australian newspapers and the integrated marketing services business, as well as the absence of contributions from the closure of The News of the World in the U.K.

Analysts, however, appeared less interested in the scandal than in the company’s surging TV and entertainment businesses. The strong performance in these segments was driven in part by the popularity of Fox (NSDQ: NWS) News, FX cable and hit movies like Rio and an Alvin and the Chipmunks.

News Corp also enjoyed strong results from its affiliate BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) which posted improved quarterly income of $174 million compared to $109 million one year ago.

The company also said it expects a reinvigorated performance from Dow Jones as a result of a new CEO, a strong brand and new digital platforms.

Related

• News Corp Settles Hack Claims On Basis Execs Lied And Destroyed Evidence
• Bloomberg's Lex Fenwick Named Dow Jones CEO
• Jon Miller, News Corp.: It's All About Video For Us Right Now

Time Warner’s filmed entertainment division grew 7 percent in the fourth quarter, bringing in $3.9 billion in revenue.

The disc rental delays, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes told investors, “have enabled our titles to significantly outperform competitive titles without a window.”

Warner Home Entertainment recently extended from 28 to 56 days the delay in which it makes its movies available for rental on Netflix. It’s also trying to extend Redbox’s delay to 56 days, although the kiosk chain is resisting. “We’ll keep working to extend the window for kiosk owners and brick-and-mortar chains,” Bewkes said.

Time Warner’s growth was also spurred by its networks division, with subscriptions to HBO and and carriage fees for channels like TNT leading to a 5 percent growth in revenue to $3.5 billion.

For the entire year, Time Warner reported an 8 percent uptick in revenue to $29 billion and 7 percent growth in operating income to $5.8 billion.

Bewkes cited the HBO Go streaming initiative as a growth driver for the conglomerate’s subscription business, which also grew 5 percent in the fourth quarter.

He used the call to urge major cable carriers including Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) to make HBO Go available through connected TV devices including Roku, noting that greater accessibility to premium cable content will make consumers less likely to cancel their cable subscriptions in favor of over-the-top programming services.

“Not allowing the consumer to access premium content on any device they choose actually increases the relative value of over the top services that really offer the same programming at a later window,” Bewkes said.

Related

• Will Netflix Kill Ratings For Pay Cable?

For the year, the company swung to a £75.9 million net income from a £141.4 million loss a year earlier, as annual revenue rose three percent to £4 billion.

Virgin doubled sign-ups to its new TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) PVR, now at a total 435,000 - but, though it increased its TV subscribe base between October and December, it lost 0.4 percent of its TV subscribers compared with the previous year.

The TiVo box is a big improvement from its predecessor but is still suffering from some quirks, still doesn’t offer some baseline features its predecessor did (like BBC Red Button) and is slow to roll out promised over-the-top services except for Spotify.

Virgin TV customers are now averaging 90 million VOD views per month on their set top boxes through a combination of recordings and hosted on-demand services, exceeding a billion total in 2011 (up 14 percent from 2010).

The company’s strategy is to cater to what it says is growing, voracious demand for digital entertainment and information - in part through its TiVo box and in part by increasing speeds of its broadband service, with which it has a competitive advantage against most copper-wire services by virtue of being fibre optic.

Release.

The site clocked a whopping 99 million unique browsers in January, it said, citing its own Omniture (NSDQ: OMTR) logs - 77 percent up from the previous year and 15 percent up from the previous month. It is not yet profitable, thanks to growth investment.

Relative to its burgeoning audience and relative to rivals, Mail Online’s income has often appeared small. Though actual figures were not given on Wednesday, Mail Online and stablemate Metro.co.uk together made £19 million through 2010/11, according to a previous disclosure. But that is partly because, unlike peers, DMGT reports the sites’ results separately from a whole set of supporting classifieds sites that make the bulk of its digital money and which make Mail Online look small in isolation.

Those classified sites - including Jobsite, Motoring.co.uk and the Digital Property Group - appear to be recovering from the economic downturn’s battering they faced in 2011, with eight percent quarterly revenue growth and a “solid performance” from the property sites, DMGT says.

Across formats, revenue for Associated Newspapers, the national division in which the Mail sits, is now stable compared with last year, helped by the digital growth off-setting a “weak” print ad market.

But, in DMGT’s Northcliffe regional newspaper division, revenues fell nine percent because the publisher has moved some daily titles to weekly and because ad revenue is a tenth below 2010 rates. The publisher finds itself hiking cover prices to make up for lost sales and continuing to cut costs - it lopped off 12 percent of costs in the last year, including shedding three percent of its staff.

DMGT’s real engine is B2B, not consumer, information, whose revenue rose three percent.

Digital circulation and advertising revenue growth of 51 percent from the previous year came thanks to Future having pushed 65 of its titles to iTunes Store upon Newsstand’s launch early in October.

The result is finally an encouraging sign of light at the end of the tunnel for legacy media businesses which have spent years attempting to transition their efforts from analogue to digital.

Future CEO Mark Wood: “We are starting to see a significant change in the shape of the business as our digital innovation enables us to reach entirely new consumers in global digital markets.”

Future’s UK revenue for the quarter still fell by two percent, but that was mostly from the loss of a separate customer publishing contract, Future reported in Wednesday’s interim earnings disclosure.

Now, for some, the reality may be dawning that, despite many digital products reaping owners dimes rather than dollars when compared with print equivalents, publishing them at scale can nevertheless return a company to pre-digital revenue growth rates.

As paidContent reported in January, Future’s free container apps for its tablet editions have been downloaded nearly 10 million times since Newsstand’s October launch, generating individual sales of over 430,000 magazines during the period.

Forty percent of tablet edition sales are subscriptions, but some of them may be short-term renewals.

“Print sales will be challenging, but we expect digital revenue to maintain a vigorous growth rate,” the company added in its market disclosure on Wednesday.

In the U.S., Future has been more challenged by the more rapid evaporation of print magazine circulations. But, after the board jettisoned CEO Stevie Spring and its finance director in October, replacement Wood has tackled the problem by selling Future’s U.S.-facing music magazines for up to $3 million and by committing to launch U.S. versions of its Radar web portals, starting with TechRadar. Cost cuts have now offset U.S. revenue falls, Wood reports.

The company did not specify print circulation trends.

In figures released this morning, McClatchy announced earnings of $0.49 per share which surpassed analyst predictions of $0.35. Total operating income for the quarter was $90.3 million, compared to $89.3 million a year ago.

Overall, it appears McClatchy’s deep cost-cutting and ongoing debt reduction have resulted in a stable business operation that is being supplemented by successful online investments. Dividends from these investments, which also include CareerBuilder.com, together contributed $28.8 million to McClatchy’s net income in 2011. The company also reported strong growth in its daily-deal product.

Despite this good news, McClatchy faces the same race against time as other newspaper chains which are losing print revenues faster than they can grow digital ones. While the bottom line of papers like the Miami Herald and El Neuvo Herald are improving and circulation has stabilized, print advertising fell by about 5% in the quarter.

Another sign of concern for McClatchy and other newspaper chains is sluggish growth in digital advertising. Sales in the category actually declined 2% in the quarter for McClatchy but this reflects the fact that many digital ads were sold as a bundle with print ads. McClatchy said pure digital sales increased 7.5%. Overall, though, digital still accounts for less than a quarter of the company’s ad revenues.

McClatchy’s share price was up 15% to $2.59 in mid-morning trading.

Related

• NYT Co Sees Drop In Earnings But 20% Rise In Digital Subs
• McClatchy Profits Fall Amid Industrywide Declines
• The New York Times' About.com: From All-Star To Albatross

For Lagardere, which operates several imprints including the flagship Hachette, e-books grew to make up six percent of total 2011 publishing sales. In the October-to-December Q4, that was 20 percent in the U.S., 10 percent in UK.

Hachette’s total U.S. book sales revenue grew 12.8 percent thanks to strong bestsellers withstanding Borders’ bankruptcy. But even Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, for which Hachette has some territorial rights, did not stop UK sales slipping 4.5 percent - something Lagardere blamed on the collapse of Australia’s Borders operator, REDgroup.

Lagardere said the U.S. sales growth was “despite the impact of e-books, which generate lower net sales per unit but higher margin”. It did not specify sales numbers by volume.

In contrast, the publisher reported: “In France, new e-readers were launched in the autumn but have not triggered a breakthrough in the market yet.”

Lagardere group revenue fell 0.2 percent (like-for-like), with stable performances from its magazine and TV businesses and from its print news distribution business, plus 10 percent growth from its talent management division thanks to the upcoming Euro 2012 and Olympic Games events.

But Lagardere forecasts a profit fall of up to 12 percent for the full year. And it said the worsening economy plus an expected poor autumn performance from its talent management division and a dip in shares of its Canal+ TV company will force it to record full-year impairment losses of around €900 ($1173.78/£745.29) million.

Release

The Charles Zhang-led company, which operates the Sogou search site and Changyou online gaming business, saw Q4 online advertising revenues grow 51 percent from a year earlier to $101 million, including a 248 percent rise for Sogou to $23 million.

Co-president Belinda Wang: “In 2011, the internet population in China exceeded 500 million and we witnessed a continuing trend where marketing spending by brand advertisers has been shifting from offline to online.”

The trend is lifting more than just Sohu. According to iResearch, 2011 Chinese internet advertising revenue rose 57.3 percent to surpass newspaper print advertising on 51.19 billion yuan ($8.11 billion), according to iResearch, which predicts 100 billion in online ad sales in 2013.

Sohu’s operating profit fell 26 percent to $49 million on higher video investment.

{data_set="30"}

Release

The NYT Co numbers, announced this morning, showed operating profit for Q4 declined to $106.6 million compared to $111.6 million for the same period a year ago. Revenues fell to $643 million, a 2.8% drop off.

The company’s earnings were $0.39 per share which is lower than the $0.41 analysts had predicted. The number reflects one-off charges, including severance costs tied to former CEO Janet Robinson who was forced out in December. Without the special charges, the company would have posted earnings of $0.45 per share.

In the bigger picture, the announcement reflects the familiar story of a newspaper property facing advertising declines that have yet to be offset by new digital dollars.

Revenue from print advertising fell 7.8% and digital advertising revenues dropped too—by 4.9%.

The drop in digital revenues would be a cause for alarm but for the fact that they stem from a drop in cost-per-click and display advertising at the About.com group.

If About.com is excluded, digital revenues at the New Media Group (which includes core properties like the Times) grew by 10% to $233.5 million.

Also encouraging is a 20% increase in digital subscribers which coincides with an expanded use of paywalls at the company.

Total paid subscribers to digital subscription packages, e-readers and replica editions of The Times and the International Herald Tribune totaled approximately 390,000 at the end of the year. The Boston Globe equivalents had 16,000 paid subscribers.

The numbers did not reflect the company’s recent sale of its Regional Media Group of sixteen newspapers in the south. The sale will result in proceeds of about $150 million, including tax benefits, which the company is expected to use to further its digital strategy.

In morning trading, NYT Co shares were off about 1.3% to $7.57.

paidContent will have more analysis following an earnings call that is taking place later this morning.

Related

• The New York Times vs. Mail Online: Who's Got The Better Business Model?
• Updated: NYT Mistakenly Sends Mass E-Mail Claiming Subs Have Canceled
• Janet Robinson Stepping Down As NYT CEO; Memo From Arthur Sulzberger
• New York Times Selling Regional Papers To Halifax Media Group

Q3 net income swung from last year’s 72.3 billion yen profit to a 159 billion yen ($2 billion) loss, as sales dipped 17.4 percent. All divisions brought in fewer sales than the previous year.

Sony (NYSE: SNE) blamed the worsening global economy plus localised issues like Thai floods and the aftershocks in Japan’s post-tsunami economy…

What connected TV boom?
TV sales led the company’s declines, with revenue down 42.9 percent. But that’s partly because a Japanese government TV subsidy scheme had ended.

Games is Sony’s most resilient division - down only 9.7 percent.
But Sony said the business contributed to its overall losses because of the cost of re-promoting its previously hacked PlayStation Network and cutting PlayStation 3 price to head off Xbox.

Music can’t live on big stars
Sony Music Entertainment sales dipped 11.7 percent despite two big Adele releases.

Sony Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) is struggling against competition
Sales fell 15.7 percent because feature phone owners are moving to rivals’ smartphones. For the 2011/12 full year, sales are now forecast to be five billion yen (€50 million) below November’s forecast.

“As challenging as times are for Sony now, were it not for the strong leadership of Sir Howard Stringer these past seven years, we would have been in a much more difficult position,” Hirai said on his appointment.

“The path we must take is clear: to drive the growth of our core electronics businesses - primarily digital imaging, smart mobile and game; to turn around the television business; and to accelerate the innovation that enables us to create new business domains.”

The growth of 10 percent is the third consecutive quarter of ads growth for the company, but AOL still has a ways to go before it can keep pace with wider online ad growth: according to figures from eMarketer, the overall U.S. ad market grew by 23.5 percent in the same quarter that AOL grew only 10 percent. Ditto for annual figures, where AOL grew ads for the year by two percent while the wider market grew by 23.5 percent to $32 billion.

eMarketer also points out that AOL’s current share of the U.S. display market is only at 4.2 percent, a decline from 4.8 percent in 2010 and 10.6 percent in 2007. Compare that to Facebook which had a share of 16.3 percent in 2011 (figures from comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) yesterday put that share at an even higher number, just under 28 percent).

Still AOL managed to exceed average Wall Street estimates as polled by Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Finance: their figure was $0.16 per share, while in actuality it was $0.23, at the high end of analyst estimates.

Some of the figures from AOL’s Q4 earnings sheet:

—AOL’s Q4 revenues are still in decline but as AOL points out the decline is the lowest it’s been in five years. AOL reported revenues of $576.8 million for the quarter, down three percent on a year ago. FY 2011 revenues were at $2.2 billion, down nine percent on 2010.

—Quarterly net income saw a big decline over the last year: $22.8 million, down by 66 percent over the same quarter a year ago. However, for the full year, AOL has managed to post a big reversal on its performance a year ago, when it reported a net loss of $782.5 million; for FY 2011 it posted net income of $13.1 million.

—Global display revenues were up by 15 percent to $170.6 million, and third-party network revenues were up by 20 percent to $104.8 million: we’ve seen some interesting deals with AOL in the latter category, for example its agreement to sell ads for Bonnier’s Parenting.com.

—Search and contextual ads remain the smallest parts of the overall ad business and saw further declines this time around, too: they were $88.4 million for the quarter, a decline of eight percent.

—Subscription revenue was down by 18 percent to $194.6 million; despite the declines, still more revenues than AOL is getting from its display ad business.

AOL says that video continues to remain a growing business, as does its Project Devil branded advertising push and its local Patch service, which doubled its revenues, although AOL didn’t break them out separately.

Traffic for AOL’s content sites, under the Huffington Post Media Group, were able to offset declines at MapQuest and AIM, but that meant that overall traffic was flat.

Here’s a look at our own compilation of data to chart how AOL has progressed under CEO Tim Armstrong:

{data_set="35"}

We will be speaking with CEO Tim Armstrong later today, which will hopefully provide some more color to these figures.

Related

• Report: Facebook's IPO To Start At $5 Billion, And It's Coming Wednesday AM
• Social Network Ads: LinkedIn Falls Behind Twitter; Facebook Biggest Of All
• Updated: Bonjour! AOL Takes French Le Huffington Post Live
• Yahoo: Revenues Slightly Down, Investors Await Words Of Wisdom From New CEO
• Paul Berry, CTO: I Left HuffPost For The Startup Bug-Or In This Case, Mouse
• Updated: Can HuffPo Pull Off A Double Whammy With A New Video News Service?
• HuffPo Partners With L'Espresso For 'L'Huffington Post Italy'
• All In The Family: AOL, Bonnier's Parenting Group Form Ad, Content Alliance
• What's Coming In 2012: Digital Advertising, Up Close And Personal

The growth in Amazon’s print sales could be attributed to Borders’ liquidation in 2011. Szkutak did not say whether the company’s print book revenues increased.

During the call, several analysts expressed concern that North American media sales grew relatively slowly during the quarter—they were up just 8 percent, to $2.56 billion, for Q4, despite the release of the Kindle Fire and new Kindle e-readers. (North American media sales grew 12.9 percent in Q4 2010.)

Szkutak sought to downplay those concerns, repeatedly attributing the slow growth to a decline in video game revenues year-on-year. “That’s impacting the North American media number, particularly versus Q4 last year,” he said—though he said at another point that the company “usually” sees declines in video game revenues in Q4 so it was unclear why things were worse this year.

In response to Goldman Sachs analyst Heather Bellini’s question on whether Kindle Fire sales are cannibalizing sales of Kindle e-ink readers, Szkutak said “both did very well and we’re very pleased with the growth we’re seeing there.”

As for Kindle Fire customers’ conversions to Amazon Prime (they get a 30-day free trial automatically with the purchase of the device), as well as Prime customers’ profitability in general,
Szkutak said it’s too early to tell but, as usual, “we like what we’re seeing.” Amazon is committed to “adding more content to Prime and making Prime better,” he said. “We think it is very good for customers and very good for shareowners….From what we see so far, it supports continued strong investment, so that’s what we’re doing.” He promised “over time we’ll be sharing more.”

Related

• Amazon Misses Estimates: Q4 Earnings Down 58 Percent

Amazon says Kindle sales (of the Fire and e-readers) “nearly tripled” during the nine-week holiday period ending December 31, up 177 percent over the previous year. As usual, the company did not state how many Kindles it has actually sold.

Operating income was $260 million for the quarter—beating the company’s forecast for operating income between -$200 million and $250 million for the quarter, though down 45 percent from last year. Amazon has invested heavily in fulfillment centers and devices and is believed to be taking a loss on the Kindle Fire. It has stressed that it thinks of the Kindle business in terms of “lifetime value,” including the device, accessories, content, ad-based revenue and the “special offers” on the ad-supported Kindles.

North American media sales grew just 8.1 percent during the quarter, to $2.56 billion, despite the release of the Kindle Fire and new e-readers during the quarter. International media sales for the quarter grew 20.3 percent, to $3.45 billion. Amazon launched Kindle stores in Italy and Spain during the quarter.

Amazon stressed the growth of its various video services, though it did not break out their revenues: The number of videos purchased or rented from Amazon Instant Video “more than doubled” over last year, as did the number of Instant Video customers. And “the number of Prime Instant Video streams increased nearly 300% in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter.” (Prime Instant Video is available free to Amazon Prime members, who can choose from a library of over 13,000 titles.)

release

Related

• Amazon Expects 'Record Quarter' For Device Sales, Continues Push Into Video
• Amazon Earnings Down Sharply For Q3 2011, Even As Sales Rise
• Analyst Estimates Amazon Has Sold 6 Million Kindle Fires
• Well, Here's How Amazon Publishing Will Get Its Books Into Barnes & Noble
• For Amazon Shareholders, Prime Boosts Costs And Trashes Profits
• Are New Tablets Slowing The Growth Of E-Readers?
• Amazon Dances Around Kindle Sales Numbers (Again), But Kindle Fire Was Hot

TV subscriber additions fell to 40,000 in Q2, from 140,000 the previous year. CEO Jeremy Darroch conceded to City analysts: “Some people are uneasy about making a long-term commitment right now.”

But half-year operating profit rose 16 percent to £601 million on six percent higher revenue of £3.36 billion and average annual customer revenue rose £8 to to £544. Total customer base grew 100,000 to 10.4 million.

“The company made a number of announcements which confirm that – beyond the near term slowdown – structural issues are looming,” Bernstein analyst Claudio Aspesi writes in a research note.

“While we believe the Pay TV business is inherently more defensive than advertising-funded ones, the depth and length of the downturn in the UK economy are still unknown: any significant changes to our forecasts for the UK TV ad market could be large enough to change the outlook for the stock.”

In the worsening consumer economy, Sky is trying to sweeten existing subscribers with new accessibility…

• Device access for subscribers: Sky Go, for watching Sky on non-satellite devices, got 1.5 million unique users in December and is launching on Android in February, with new channels Sky 1, Sky Living, Sky Arts 1 and Sky Sports F1 being added.
• Public WiFi for subscribers: Sky is about to launch its public WiFi service based on its The Cloud acquisition, giving Sky Broadband Unlimited customers free access to over 10,000 public hotspots.
• Fibre premium, wider footprint: Fibre broadband launching from April at up to 40Mbps for £20 per month. Meanwhile, Sky is extending its copper network to 88 percent of UK (an extra million homes) by June 2013.

And there are new threats…

• Cheaper internet TV alternatives: Sky will de-couple its movie, sport and entertainment content from satellite by taking it to the coming wave of connected TV owners as post-satellite pay-as-you-go pay-TV - an attempt to head off internet TV apps from operators like Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Lovefilm and Blinkbox.
• Premier League bidders: Al Jazeera Sports may bid up renewal prices in the next rights round. “We’ll have to see what noise there is in the market and who we think may be there,” Darroch told analysts. “It is a blind auction, it’s a sealed bid, but it goes through rounds. Not all packages are awarded in the first round.”

“The unbundling of pay-TV appears a direct response to the launch of Netflix, but also seems to suggest that additional growth through the old model of bundled pay-TV through satellite is coming to a natural end in its growth,” Bernstein’s Aspesi writes.

“The performance of BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) hinges on the continued availability of premium content in the face of possible new entrants determined to build competitive pay-TV businesses over different platforms.”

Gannett posted earnings of $0.49 a share for the fourth quarter, compared to $0.72 a share for the same quarter one year ago. Analysts had predicted earnings of $0.68.

The company noted that its earnings would have been $0.72 a share if it excluded special items. These included expenses related to the unexpected departure in October of its CEO due to health reasons and writedowns related to brands whose market values have diminished due to poor performance.

Advertising revenue from Gannett’s newspapers, including flagship USA Today, continued to decline as sales of real estate and legal ads were particularly soft. Overall advertising revenues in the publishing sector were $670.7 million in the quarter, compared to $722.3 million in the fourth quarter last year, a 7 percent decline.

Gannett’s broadcasting revenues, which have been a bright spot in recent quarters, also fell 14.2 percent in light of what the company says was weaker spending on political ads. This quarter, TV-related revenue was $199.8 million.

The most optimistic part of the report are Gannett’s digital operations, which are both profitable and growing. The company cited particularly strong results at its Career Building site as helping to drive $185 million in digital revenue last quarter, a 9.1 percent increase from a year ago. If digital revenues related to publishing are folded in, the company had digital revenues of $290.3 million for the quarter.

Gannett says its USAToday.com website and related apps are among the most popular on the web and that its consolidated domestic Internet audience share was 50.8 million unique visitors. It says its Newsquest product in the UK is also popular.

The numbers were announced prior to the market opening. Gannett’s stock fell has since almost five percent to $14.48 in morning trading while the general market was down less than one percent.

The company’s full release can be found here.

Related

• Gannett Goes Long With Acquisition Of Fantasy Sports Ventures
• USA Today Acquires Mixed-Martial Arts Site MMAjunkie
• Gannett's Digital Revenues Gain, As Profits, Circ Shrink

New figures from Strategy Analytics show that Nokia, with shipments (which Nokia terms “sales”: more on that below) of 113.5 million, has continued to hold on to its position as the number-one phone maker in Q4. Its lead has narrowed by quite some way over last year: it was at 26.9 percent for the quarter and 25.5 percent for the year, compared to 30.9 percent and 33.3 percent for the quarter and year in 2010.

Samsung, shipping 95 million units, made smaller gains than Nokia lost: 1.1 percent on the quarter and 0.5 percent on the year to claim the number two-slot.

What stood in its way to overtaking Nokia? Apple (NSDQ: AAPL). On the strength of its smartphone-only portfolio, it made the biggest gain in market share of the top-three, picking up 4.3 percentage points for the quarter on shipments (like Nokia, Apple calls them “sales”) of 37 million units, to take an 8.3 percent share of the market for the quarter, and 6 percent for the year.

That’s sort of comparing apples with oranges, though. When comparing like-for-like: Apple has edged past Samsung for the quarter with a 0.4 percent lead in market share in smartphones, while over the whole of 2011, Samsung just about still leads Apple, with a 0.9 percent lead.

Nokia trailed the two by nearly twelve percentage points for the quarter, a big reversal from a year ago when it was well in the lead as the biggest-single smartphone maker.

Figures out today from IHS iSuppli, meanwhile, add in two more handset makers to the mix. It says that Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) took the number-four slot after the first three (ranking them in the same order as Strategy Analytics); with Motorola (NYSE: MMI) just behind, with six million and five million devices shipped, respectively. IHS did not include RIM (NSDQ: RIMM), HTC or LG (SEO: 066570)—other notable vendors—in its rankings; they have not reported quarterly figures this week.

In both smartphones and mobile devices overall, “Others” grew numbers in unit terms and made an annual gain on market share to become the biggest group for 2011 market share in Strategy Analytics’ figures. That means still a lot of competition out there from many handset makers, with none of them having a significant enough share to merit placement in the top-three.

On a services level, that speaks to a continuing and strong amount of device fragmentation. That will continue to slow down revenue growth in other areas like mobile content and advertising—areas where it pays for there to be scale to charge the biggest prices. (Case in point: can you imagine what TV advertising or content production would be like if distributors and media buyers had to format ads for different TV set models?)

On shipments versus sales. While these numbers can be instructive, they can also be confusing: If you look at Strategy Analytics’ “shipments” numbers, they are the same as the “sales” numbers that companies like Apple and Nokia reported this week. Neil Mawston, executive director for Strategy Analytics’ global wireless practice, says vendors “tend to use those words interchangeably” even though one refers to actual devices in people’s hands, while the other is for devices that have been shipped to distributors, but not necessarily sold. “They can be open to interpretation,” he admitted. “A lot of companies use smoke and mirrors,” so Strategy Analytics uses other measures such as “channel checks” to measure shipments.

On RIM. It’s notable that RIM didn’t appear in the top-three smartphone makers, so I asked Mawston about their prospects: He says they are “not too far behind number-three” at the moment in overall rankings and smartphones, “and if they had a good quarter or two they could get close.” But the trend so far has been that RIM’s been slowing down and “not providing too much competition” globally. He didn’t mention Motorola or Sony Ericsson, which made iSuppli’s global ranking.

On Samsung. Mawston believes Samsung will stay ahead in smartphones, even with Apple’s strong Q4: “It just has more price points, appeals to both post and prepaid customers, and has a bigger distribution network among carriers,” he said, adding that Apple may well give it a run for its money. “They may trade places for a few quarters.”

He notes that Apple has a massive retail presence in some countries like the U.S. but ultimately it’s the carrier network that really gives device makers that extra leg up in worldwide sales—a key pillar of Nokia‘s fightback strategy, too. “The key thing with carriers is that they can subsidize the iPhone [or another device]. Without operator subsidies, [smartphones] would be nowhere near as large right now.”

Related

• Samsung: Smartphones Up 30 Percent But You Have To Guess How Many We Sold
• Nokia Q4: Scrambling For A Grip, But Still Falling; 1M+ Lumia Phones Sold
• At $99, Nokia And AT&T Hoping To Spark Interest In Lumia 900
• Kantar: Apple Back On Top As Bestselling Smartphone In The U.S.
• Motorola Lost $285 Million In 2011 Selling Phones
• Tablets: Apple's Lead Narrows Among Widening Field Of Android Makers
• AT&T: The iPhone Was Good, But Not Good Enough To Hold Off A Q4 Loss

Record profits were the big story for Samsung during the fourth quarter, in which it recorded $4.7 billion in profit according to Reuters (NYSE: TRI). Revenue was up 13 percent to 47.3 trillion won ($42 billion) and profit rose 16 percent compared to last year. Samsung is of course a huge conglomerate, with businesses ranging from mobile phones and televisions to semiconductors and refrigerators.

Samsung’s mobile unit reported a 54 percent increase in revenue and a 74 percent increase in profits, hours after fellow Android rival Motorola (NYSE: MMI) reported a loss for its fourth quarter. Samsung has had the upper hand in the Android world for several months despite Google’s pending purchase of Motorola, with devices like the Samsung Galaxy S II and Galaxy Nexus leading the way. But it provided no data on tablet sales, several months after the launch of the Galaxy Tab, something even Motorola was able to disclose.

The company would only say that smartphone shipments increased 30 percent compared to the past quarter, which analysts interviewed by Reuters interpreted as around 36 million units, just shy of the 37 million iPhones that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) sold during its first fiscal quarter. It’s quite disappointing that Samsung would take a cue from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and Nokia (NYSE: NOK) in declining to report actual shipment totals, but it’s understandable why the company may not welcome direct comparisons with competitors.

Related

• Motorola Lost $285 Million In 2011 Selling Phones
• Samsung Is Doing Well; Now Raising $1B, Looking To Tizen To Do Better?
• Samsung/HTC: Two Sides Of An Android Coin. Why's Samsung Winning The Toss?
• Samsung Electronics Reorg: Apple's Friends On One Side; Foes On The Other?

Revenue was in line with the lowered guidance Motorola provided in December of $3.4 billion. Excluding special items, earnings per share were $0.20, far greater than expectations of $0.06, but using the GAAP standard Motorola recorded a net loss of $80 million compared to a net income of $80 million in last year’s fourth quarter.

Smartphone shipments came in at 5.3 million units, up from 4.9 million units a year ago, while tablet shipments remained anemic at just 200,000 units. For the full year Motorola shipped 18.7 million smartphones and 1 million tablets, it said.

But Motorola’s mobile division had a scary year: the group recorded an operating loss of $285 million for the full year, and an operating loss of $70 million in the fourth quarter. Motorola didn’t make any money selling phones last year, either, losing $70 million for the full year.

Those totals include sales of regular old feature phones, still a big part of Motorola’s overall business. The company sold 10.5 million mobile devices in the fourth quarter and 42.4 million devices for the year.

Motorola is still waiting to hear if regulators will approve Google’s bid to purchase the company for $12.5 billion, and as a result it no longer holds the customary conference call following the release of an earnings report.

(Updated 4:46 p.m. ET: I changed the original headline and a couple of references in the text to make it clear that Motorola’s losses were across all of its mobile devices, not just smartphones.)

Related

• Correction: Razr Ain't Cutting It: Motorola Mobility To Fall Short On Q4
• One More Step In The Google/Motorola Merger: EU Approval Sought
• Updated: Smartphone Growth Helps Motorola Earnings, Xoom Shipments Plummet
• Motorola Xoom Discounted Again In The Tablet Race To The Bottom
• DOJ Puts Google/Motorola On Hold With Request For More Info

The $4 billion charge—$3 billion in fees and $1 billion in wireless spectrum to T-Mobile USA—put a big dampener the quarter, which otherwise saw big gains in what the carrier refers to as its “growth engines”: wireless services and specifically those around smartphones; wireline data, including its U-verse TV service; and business services.

Overall revenues were $32.5 billion for the quarter, coming in above analyst estimates according to a poll from Yahoo. Excluding the charges, earnings per share were $0.42, which missed average analysts’ estimates of $0.43. The total net loss for the quarter was $6.63 billion.

iPhone juggernaut. It’s been a year since AT&T lost its exclusive grip on the iPhone in the U.S. but such is the power of the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) brand in wireless right now, and AT&T’s continuing hold on its original iPhone customers, that the carrier nevertheless continues to get great dividends out of its association with it. AT&T said that it made 7.6 million iPhone activations for the quarter, with overall smartphone sales totaling 9.4 million devices.

AT&T didn’t spell out exactly how many iPhones it sold of those activated—and indeed some could have been bought directly from Apple unlocked. But if you assume that most would have been bought directly via AT&T, that works out to AT&T accounting for some 20 percent of the 37 million iPhones Apple sold in the last quarter, and iPhone accounting for some 80 percent of AT&T’s smartphone sales.

It also shows that despite some of the negative press that AT&T has faced over the quality of its wireless data network, it is still holding on to its customers over competitors Verizon and Sprint (NYSE: S). In its earnings earlier this week, Verizon noted that it had sold 7.7 million smartphones and seen 4.3 million iPhone activations in the quarter.

Correspondingly, AT&T said it saw a 10 percent growth in wireless revenues to $16.7 billion. Wireless data revenue growth is outstripping that of mobile revenues overall: it was $5.9 billion, up nearly 20 percent on a year ago, which AT&T says was driven by internet access, app usage and messaging.

AT&T’s fixed digital content play isn’t doing so bad, either. Revenues for its U-verse high-speed broadband and TV service were up by almost 44 percent over a year ago, and partly offset declines in DSL. Still not by enough: total revenues for wireline services were down by 1.4 percent to $14.9 billion.

AT&T does not break out tablets as an individual category and instead groups them with other non-phone “branded computing devices” like aircards. It said it had its best-ever quarter for the category, with sales of 571,000 with total subscribers now numbering 5.1 million, a rise of 70 percent.

Related

• Verizon Moved 4.2 Million iPhones In Q4 But Costs Higher Than Expected

Nokia currently has two models Windows Phone devices in the market, the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710, both 3G models, and is planning to launch a new 4G version in the U.S. in March of this year.

The day before Nokia’s results, a trio of news items released by the company—combined with the “leak” that it would be offering its first 4G phone, the Lumia 900, at a massive discount to the rest of the 4G offerings out there—looked a little like padding for worse news to come today, and that’s more or less what we got:

Handset unit sales were down eight percent to 113.5 million.

Feature phones actually held up in their unit sales: 93.9 million for the quarter, down by only one percent.

Smartphones, however, did significantly worse: 19.6 million devices, down 31 percent.

Device revenues overall were €6 billion, down 29 percent. Again, the biggest weakness was in smartphones, which had sales of €2.74 billion, down 38 percent.

Not surprisingly, Nokia is very much trying to draw a line under last year, one of profound transformation for the company, and look ahead to what 2012 will hold.

It’s taking a very aggressive strategy to pick up much-needed market share for its devices in key markets like the U.S. and UK, offering its handsets at massive discounts—and in the case of the UK, even free under certain contracts. That tactic will come at a big price though: unless Nokia has worked out a way to make high-end devices for less money than its competitors, it will continue to see erosion of its margins and device average selling price. In other words, it might win business, but at what cost?

In the quarter just ended, those margins continued their decline. In this quarter Nokia reported gross margins of 23.7 percent on smart devices, compared to 30.8 percent for the same quarter a year ago. ASP for smartphones was down by only three percent to €140—a figure that was helped by sales of more expensive models such as the N9 and the Lumia 800, according to Nokia. Feature phones saw a decline of 10 percent in ASP to €35, their lowest price yet.

Windows Phone sales. Nokia reached a milestone—or a “beachhead” as it calls it—by selling more than 1 million Lumia handsets. But this number is still a far, far cry from the 20.8 million smart devices that Nokia sold in Q4 of 2009, let alone the 37 million iPhones sold by Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) sold in Q4 2011.

The Windows Phone platform, according to figures from Kantar out this week, accounted for less than two percent of sales in any of the nine countries it surveys as a barometer of smartphone demand. That points to a very long road ahead for both companies to bring those numbers into a more credibly competing realm.

Nokia says that it will introduce its first WP7 devices into China and Latin America in the first half of 2012. This is important for a number of reasons: Greater China is currently Nokia’s second-largest market after Europe (€5 billion in device sales for China compared to €7 billion for Europe), but it is declining, seeing an 18 percent drop in revenues over last year and 20 percent in volumes. Meanwhile, LatAm is Nokia’s second-smallest market after North America but it’s one of the only ones that is growing (Middle East being the other growth region.) In LatAm, Nokia had sales of €2.5 billion on volumes of 46 million units.

LatAm and China are also both markets where Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has yet to introduce Windows Phone, and where there is still a lot of room for smartphone growth—something that Apple, RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) and Android makers have not overlooked, either. Still, that means a population of consumers with less preconceptions about Android and iOS being “the” smartphone platforms of the future—getting through to those consumers is crucial if Microsoft truly hopes to makes its OS a truly global smartphone player.

Design front and center. In one more move to shore up confidence for the year ahead, Nokia today, separately, also announced that Marko Ahtisaari has been promoted to the position of EVP of design, and has also joined the company’s leadership team. Ahtisaari is a Nokia veteran who left the company and then returned after it acquired his social networking startup Dopplr. The emphasis on design is a significant one, considering that this is where Nokia will have to differentiate and excel in the years ahead as it makes phones on a platform—Windows Phone—that is also being used by its competitors.

During the earnings analyst call, Nokia executives gave a bit more color to the results:

CEO Stephen Elop acknowledged some of the big issues facing declining sales for the Symbian platform but still said the company would continue to remain committed to supporting the OS through 2016. Nokia earlier this year struck an outsourcing deal with Accenture to take over the management of the platform as part of its gradual winding down of operations. In the last year, Nokia has rolled out several new devices based on Symbian, and has a roadmap for updates to the software for the year ahead.

Nokia also highlighted the platform support payments and licensing fees that Microsoft and Nokia are paying each other. It was described by the company’s CFO Timo Ihamuotila as a “competitive” structure that will run in the billions of dollars between the two companies—although no indication of which party benefits more financially from those. This last quarter, Nokia recorded a payment of $250 million from Microsoft as a result of this arrangement and did not specify whether it paid out money to Microsoft as well. Consider that without that quarter-billion dollar payment those bottom-line results would have been even more gloomy.

The company will be offering a dividend of 20 euro cents per share and has no plans for stock repurchases in the year ahead.

Elop also highlighted something we have heard many times already—from carriers and Nokia itself: “The third ecosystem” argument is “very strong” with carriers. One wonders what that might mean between the lines. More big discounts, subsidized by operators, in the pipeline? More large orders ahead? Preferential treatment for Nokia over other platforms and handset makers?

Related

• Nokia Clears The Decks Of Its Burning Platform Ahead Of Results Tomorrow
• At $99, Nokia And AT&T Hoping To Spark Interest In Lumia 900
• Why Apple Just Pulled Off The Company's First True Post-PC Quarter
• 2012 Mobile Ad Spend Revised Up To $2.6 Billion, Google Fueling The Machine
• The Year Of The Dumb And Dumber, Sub-$100 Smartphone - 500 Million Of Them
• Nokia: Three New Symbian Belle Devices Launched Today, One Costing $260
• Kantar: Apple Back On Top As Bestselling Smartphone In The U.S.