It was two weeks ago when I wrote about the impact of Apple and Samsung on the overall economy. Meanwhile we have completed the first quarter of 2012 and companies are reporting on their quarterly results.

Not all results are available today, but we have enough data points to see some trends. We have compiled the corporate results in terms of quarterly revenues and net profit. All data are from the company’s press releases or sites like Bloomberg and Yahoo finance. We don’t guarantee the accuracy of the numbers as some companies restate their results at a later date.

Much of the data is reported in local currencies and we compare them on a $US basis. If there is no $US data available from a company, we use the current exchange rate as provide on the Internet. Two companies we are still expecting numbers from are Sharp and Panasonic. While Sharp has released Year end data (their FY ends in March), we could not find any quarterly data.

The summary of the results are shown in the attached table. The first graph shows the revenue and net profit data for a range of CE companies for the first quarter of 2012. As can be seen, these companies fall into a two class society; the ones who succeed and the ones who are struggling. The two leaders are Apple and Samsung. Maybe it is not an accident that these two are facing off in many patent suits around the globe, they are fighting for the world leadership (in CE products anyway).

All the other companies are basically not profitable at his point in time. While most managed to eke out a little profit, we have to remember that most CE corporations sell much more than just CE products. In some cases, like Samsung and Toshiba, this extends even beyond appliances.

The company that shows up here in the worst shape is Sony. We do not want to add a story about the demise of Sony here, but when looked at it in more detail, Sony had a significant tax impact from former years in this quarter. As already published around the world, Sony is also looking at shedding 10,000 jobs to help bring the company back to profitability by FY 2013. This will be a difficult position for a company that has lost its CE design leadership many years ago. Sony may become profitable again in the near future with good business leadership, but capturing the old Sony design leadership will take many years of re-building the company.

For more analysis and trends related to the corporate results look at the May issue of our MDR report next week.