The US financial year runs October – September. Their first quarter ends Dec 31, taking in the Thanksgiving “Black Friday” mania (the biggest day for electronics sales of the year) and of course, Christmas. Manufacturers who make most of their money in the US (also known as “Everyone”) make their earnings calls in late January. Let’s see how the big players fared:

Apple – Whoa. Every quarter brings new sales records, but no-one was expecting these figures – Revenue - $46.33bn Profit - $13.06bn. Sold 37 million phones, 15 million tablets. Want to make a comparison? Telstra makes $25bn a year. In revenue. Apple now has about $100bn in cash lying around. The question is – who will they buy? They could buy any number of burgeoning firms without breaking a sweat – Twitter, Tumblr, Vizio, Greece- but the problem of course, is that they don’t. Instead they’re buying tiny companies that engineer high quality components. Intellectual property will likely be contained within the walls of 1 Infinite Loop for some time.

Nokia – Not only did the Finnish giant lose $1.3bn last quarter, they also sold 29% fewer devices compared with 12 months earlier. On the bright side, their Lumia smartphones have sold well, despite not yet being widely available (when Nokia, when?!?).

Samsung – The Korean powerhouse made $42bn on 35 million handsets sold, bringing it into almost neck and neck competition with Apple. Their profit was just shy of $5bn - very respectable, but dwarfed by Apple's $13bn. What explains the gap? The App Store? The Apple Stores? Accessories? Who knows. Apple’s share of Tablet operating system was knocked down from 67% to 59%, and that might largely be attributed to the Samsung Galaxy Tab making a big dent in the tablet market.

Motorola – No joy yet. Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s mobile phone division in August hasn’t borne any fruit yet, in the way of devices or profits. The company made $3.5bn in revenue in Q1, for an overall loss of $840m. One “innovation” – Motorola has taken Apple to court over copyright infringement on the iCloud service. Sigh.

HTC- The former Android champion is fading next to Samsung. They continue to fight Apple in court, sometimes as plaintiff and sometimes as defendant. Meanwhile, they release a dozen phones a week, cheapening their brand. They made $11bn in revenue, well below forecasts. Their share price has been cut in half from this time last year. HTC have announced recently that they will tightening their portfolio. If they become the other big producer of Windows Phone handsets, they might have a chance. Otherwise, there’s little to differentiate them from Samsung.

Blackberry - They've fired their 2 co-CEOs and replaced them with one guy. They're excited about the future. They're releasing BlackBerry OS 10 (called QNX) soon. They've nearly sold a million Playbooks, their ill-fated tablet. No financial results, and no actual product launches slated for this year. It doesn't take a forecaster to see that this company is about to take a terrifying descent on the tech industry rollercoaster, one that doesn't go back up.