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Spotify’s SoundCloud acquisition talks have reached advanced stages

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If we are to believe a report on Financial Times, Spotify’s SoundCloud acquisition talks have reached advanced stages.

Back in July Bloomberg claimed that SoundCloud was looking at strategic options including a sale that could value the service at a whopping $1 billion and now a report on the FT that cites anonymous sources familiar with the matter effectively means that SoundCloud could indeed be up for grabs.

Music-streaming companies have struggled to turn a profit amid rising competition from larger players such as Apple Inc .

Amazon.com Inc is also preparing to launch a standalone music-streaming subscription service, Reuters reported in June, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

SoundCloud declined to comment, while Spotify could not immediately be reached for comment.

Huawei to manufacture Honor smartphones in India

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India’s Make in India campaign has been a huge success with a range of manufacturing companies either intending to or have already set up plants and factories in the country. Technology giants are no far behind with Huawei being the latest to join the bandwagon.

According to Huawei, it has joined hands with sketch-to-scale solutions provider Flex to produce one of the Honor smartphones in India. According to the deal, the Flex plant in Chennai will manufacture the smartphone and by the end of 2017, the plant will have a production capacity of three million units annually.

“As India is set to become the second largest smartphone market, our government would like to invite even more businesses to come and manufacture in the country,” said Information Technology and Electronics Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad at an event.

The company will strengthen its hold by opening over 200 service centres including its 30 exculsive centres across the country. Huawei Consumer Business Group will also expand its distribution network by partnering with more than 50,000 retail outlets by the end of this year.

Prasad further believed that given India’s growing smatphone landscape, such initiatives by market leaders in the technology sector will help boosting the country’s local manufacturing in the country, which is a commitment that the collaborating Flex Telecom company hoped was re-affirmed by the alliance.

“Our alliance with Huawei in India is a testament of our commitment towards boosting local manufacturing,” added Jeff Reece, Head of Flex Telecom segment.

Meanwhile Huawei India, that has been expanding its footprint in the market with a renewed focus on two brands- Huawei and Honour- was convinced about the company’s growth potential and future in India, adding that it was eager to look for more opportunities for market expansion.

Samsung Galaxy Note 7 sales could decline in China after global recall fiasco

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Samsung Galaxy Note 7 has already caused Samsung huge costs owing to global recall because of faulty batteries and now it seems that the global recall fiasco is set to hurt the South Korean consumer electronics giant badly in one of the biggest markets in the world – China.

According to reports in the Chinese local media, as many as 51.9 per cent people have revealed that they are not going to buy Samsung smartphones (including Galaxy Note 7) because of the issues with batteries. Nearly 37 per cent of those surveyed said they would consider buying an iPhone to replace their Samsung smartphone, 26.3 per cent said they would purchase a Huawei handset as replacement. This means that other companies in the country including Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi and Apple stand to benefit.

Samsung smartphone sales on the Chinese mainland “have been stagnant in the past few quarters” amid intense competition from major Chinese brands.

Read: Can Google Glass, Samsung Galaxy Note 7 be pegged as today’s tech failures?

IDC senior market analyst Tay Xiaohan believes that the global recall of the Note 7 will affect Samsung’s performance in the second quarter of 2016. The report pointed out that Galaxy Note 7 sales were underwhelming even before the issue of exploding batteries was reported.

“The Note 7 recall has convinced many of my clients to purchase the iPhone 7. Others preferred Huawei`s P9 when choosing a domestic high-end model,” a dealer was quoted as saying.

Tarun Pathak, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research, said the Note 7 recall will hurt Samsung`s share in the premium segment, which makes up nearly a quarter of total smartphone sales in mainland China.

“The models likely to benefit would be Apple`s iPhone 7 Plus, Huawei`s Mate series or Oppo`s R series,” Pathak was quoted as saying.

E-book sales slip in Q1 2016; audiobooks pick up sustantially

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Threat of the digital revolution on the world of paperback books might be on the retreat as a new report from Association of American Publishers revealed that there has been a marked decline in sales of e-books in the first quarter of 2016 and increase in sales of paperbacks.

The report notes that sales of paperback books as well as audiobooks are up and independent bookstores are thriving again. Jotting down the findings in numbers, sales of paperback books grew 6.1 per cent, downloaded audio by 35.3 per cent while the sales of hardback books declined by 8.5 per cent and sale of e-books were down by 21.8 per cent.

Looking at other numbers highlighted by the report, sales of adult books fell by 10.3 per cent in the first three months of 2016, and children’s books dropped by 2.1 per cent.

Though the numbers look bad, they’re not all that surprising. For many publishers, the first quarter is often the weakest period of the year. Publishers often save their biggest books for the summer, timed for vacation reading, and the fall, for the holiday shopping period.

One thing that does come out starkly is that there has been a decline in revenue for publishers and there are several factors that might have made book sales at the beginning of this year slightly worse than those in the same period last year. Like the movie business, publishing depends heavily on a few outsize hits each season to drive profits. In the early part of this year, there wasn’t a huge, breakout best-seller, certainly nothing like 2015’s The Girl on the Train, which came out in January and sold two million copies in just over four months.

The adult colouring-book fad, which provided a huge boost to publishers and booksellers last year, has started to fizzle, possibly driving down sales this year. (In 2015, some 12 million colouring books were sold in the US, up from one million in 2014.) And the surge in downloadable audiobook sales might account in part for the decline in hardcover and e-books, if more people are listening to books instead of reading them.

But perhaps the biggest factor affecting publishers’ revenue, and one that is not likely to go away soon, is the decline in e-book sales. While publishers once fretted that digital book sales were eroding more profitable categories like hardcover, they now are finding that e-books – which cost next to nothing to produce and zero to ship and which can’t be returned as unsold merchandise by retailers – are critical profit engines. But e-book sales have fallen precipitously for months, in part because many publishers have raised their prices after negotiating with Amazon and gaining the ability to set their own prices.

The decline of digital sales and stabilisation of print may have also led to higher returns of unsold merchandise from booksellers, reducing revenue. And while some book buyers may have traded e-books for print books, others may be buying cheaper, self-published e-books on Amazon.