Our special focus this week is on telecommunications equipment. The most recent boom in this space has of course been for Smartphone technology. The question that arises is whether or not his boom will continue and act as a cushion for the telecom space in this bleak market. Here’s what analysts Pablo Perez-Fernandez of Global Crown Capital and Mark McKechnie of American Technology Research had to say:

Mr. Perez-Fernandez: To some extent it’s going to be less affected than other sectors mainly because the growth rate of smart phones has been so much bigger than almost everything else in telecom. Nonetheless, some of the data that came out in the last quarter said that the growth rate has collapsed below 20%. So that’s been affected.

Mr. McKechnie: Our overall industry forecast for handsets, we’re looking at units down 12% year over year in 2009. That’s going to be down 10% or 15%, it’s hard to say, but the overall industry is facing a headwind and clearly handsets are an economically sensitive item, like tennis shoes. ..Smartphones as a percentage of overall handsets are going to grow and so you could see some absolute growth, but there’s no question that that headwind is going to slow down the hyper growth that we’ve seen up until now.

For the complete Telecommunication Equipment issue, including a complete overview of this space and stock picks, click here. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Technology Stocks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.