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SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Samsung Electronics Co. reported a 17 percent jump in fourth quarter profit on the strength of sales in flat panels and smartphones even as the company battled claims it had copied Apple’s iPhone.

Samsung said Friday in a regulatory filing that its net profit reached 4 trillion won ($3.5 billion) in the three months that ended in December.

The company earned 3.4 trillion won in the same quarter a year earlier.

The Suwon, South Korea-based company said its operating profit jumped 75.8 percent to 5.3 trillion won in the fourth quarter.

The figure was closely in line with the company’s estimate earlier this month of a 73 percent rise.

Samsung, the world’s biggest manufacturer of memory chips and liquid crystal displays, said demand for semiconductors in mobile products and servers remained solid despite weakness in personal computers, which face stiff competition from the rising popularity of tablets.

Samsung has over the decades grown into a key global manufacturer of components that let PCs, digital music players and handsets store data and display it on flat, high-resolution screens.

The company has recently been stepping up its challenge against Apple Inc. in the global smartphone business, releasing models such as the Galaxy S II. Cupertino, California-based Apple, which spurred the smartphone boom with the launch of its iPhone in 2007, has accused Samsung of “slavishly” copying its smartphone and iPad in design, user interface and packaging. Apple sued Samsung in April last year in the United States.

The legal battle has now spilled into 10 countries, according to Samsung officials. Court rulings so far have tended to side with Apple.

The quarterly profit brought the 2011 net profit to 13.7 trillion won, down 15 percent from the previous year, Samsung said. “If profit in handsets continues to stream in, this year will also likely be a solid one for Samsung,” said Jae Lee, an analyst at Daiwa Securities in Seoul. “The biggest threat would be if the global economy worsens.” Lee said legal battles with Apple would start weighing less on Samsung this year as the South Korean company is expected to release models with new designs. Please follow Money Game on Twitter and Facebook . Join the conversation about this story » See Also: UBS: If You Exclude Apple, Then This Earnings Season Sucks Here Are The Key Market Moving Events For Tuesday, January 24 Chemical Giant DuPont’s Q4 Earnings Decline Less Than Expected, Strength In Performance Chemicals

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Samsung Earnings Beat Expectations Even As Legal Battle With Apple Weighs On Company

Use these nine techniques to account for how your customer’s brain could be wired, and seal the deal. Since you’re a reader of Inc., I think it’s safe to assume that you and I have something in common: We both need to sell. You probably have your favorite sales techniques, and heaven knows there are hundreds of books on selling, but in my experience most entrepreneurs overlook one crucial aspect of selling: the way your customers’ brains are built. You will naturally get along with people who are like you. But that leaves out 75 percent of other people—and the worst thing you can do while selling is to approach someone the wrong way. The more you study people, the more adept you will become at identifying the ways they think and behave. When you make the effort to see the world through the eyes of others, you will know how to engage their interests and how to help them achieve their ultimate goals. But here are nine ways to use your brain—and your buyers’—to make a deal. 1. Determine right away whether you are talking to “right-brained” or “left-brained” individuals. They require very different approaches. You notice a Nerf basketball hoop, a scribbled whiteboard, and an abstract painting, you know this person is “right-brained.” If instead you notice a place for everything, an organized bookshelf, and technical equipment, you are mostly likely talking to someone “left-brained.” Using an innovative, intuitive, emotional approach on an analytical, logical, practical person would be a disaster. And vice versa. 2. Determine the influencers and decision-makers behind the sale. They may not be the highest-ranked people in the company, and they may not even be in the room when you make your presentation. Ask if it would be okay to “cc” others in the company on your materials and correspondence. 3. Keep your behavior middle-of-the-road until you know more about the prospect. You don’t want to arrive dressed for a rock concert and discover the other person is in Armani office attire. If you are generally enthusiastic but the other person is restrained, try to tone down your natural inclination to make exclamations. If you are generally reserved but the other person is an extravert, try to ratchet up your enthusiasm, so you don’t inadvertently appear indifferent. 4. You can’t be certain what type of brain your buyer has. Therefore, make sure your presentation appeals to all four types of brains. People who are analytical thinkers want to know the “ROI” right up front. Those who are structural thinkers want to improve on processes. Social thinkers, meanwhile, want to make an impact on a relationship or on the welfare of others. Conceptual ones are interested in connecting the dots. Be sure to discuss how (or if) your solution meets all these different needs. 5. To check for analytical thinkers, listen for words like “exactly” and “precisely.” An analytical thinker first wants the bottom line, to make sure your discussion is worth the time it will take. This type of brain doesn’t want to weigh a lot of options. Quickly provide an overview, then sit back and wait. Be prepared to answer all questions with spreadsheets, data, and research, and do not make a mistake or this individual will lose all confidence in you. If you don’t know an answer, say you will get it immediately after the meeting—then do so. 6. To identify structural thinkers, listen for words like “turnaround time,” “preparation,” “realistic,” “wait,” or “hold on while I get this down.” This type of thinker is concerned about whether existing systems might be affected. Be prepared to list exactly how and when your solution can be implemented. 7. To pinpoint social thinkers, listen for words like “we,” “them,” “our,” “us,” and “you all.” Is this individual concerned about relationships? Another clue is if the buyer asks you personal questions, such as, “How do you feel about the way it affects employees?” Social thinkers are eager to bring in others to the conversation. 8. To find conceptual thinkers, listen for immediate questions about the outcome. Like the analytical thinker, this type wants the bottom line right away, but in the context of the bigger picture. The worst thing you can do with a conceptual thinker is spell out everything in detail. Engage this individual’s attention immediately; otherwise you may lose it forever. You may receive farfetched or unrelated questions. Take every question at face value. 9. Keep your buyer focused on the desired solution. Remember that some buyers have several preferences and it takes them a long time to make a decision. They are weighing rationality, processes, people, and vision all at the same time. Thirty-seven percent of the people in the world fall into this kind of multimodal thinking and probably need to carefully process a decision. Allow plenty of time, even if to you it seems to take forever. You are already familiar with what you are selling; your buyer is not. As you wrap up your meeting, keep in mind what is happening in your buyer’s head. Reassure this person that your solution will generate ROI, that it will not interfere with any other systems, that the human factor is addressed, and that the vision is clear. Remember, it’s not about the way you’re product is wired but rather the way your buyer is wired.

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What’s Going On In Your Customer’s Head?

The secret to successful selling? Don’t sell right away. If you’re in a position to “sell” at your company (and no matter what you do for your company, you should be), then you know it’s not always easy to get the ear of the prospect you’re trying to sell to. The worst thing you can do is get on a call or get in front of someone you don’t know and–without knowing their problems–start selling. It’s off-putting to the person you’re selling to, and ultimately you’re wasting both his/her time and yours. So where do you start? You’ve got to get information by asking and listening, then serve up what you’re selling. Here’s how it goes. 1. Probe – It’s all about tailoring what you say to what your prospects’ needs are, and the only way to truly find out what their needs are is to probe them with a bunch of questions. Try not to jump right into the probing process until you know a bit about them first. Some of my best sales calls have been when I’ve known the school they went to, the type of dog they have or the weather where they live. It lightens up any conversation. And you can find this by researching their website, or Facebook or LinkedIn profiles. Once the questions start flying, consider these to start formulating your thoughts for how you’ll sell to a prospect. What are you using now? How do you like it? What don’t you like about your current product, or about what you’re doing now? Do you use one of our competitors? What do you like/dislike about them? With these answers, you’ll be able to roll through all of the reasons why they should consider you for their solution. 2. Listen – If you are fortunate enough to get in the door and speak to someone who cares about what you sell, shut up. Listen to their problems, listen to what their needs are and while you’re listening, develop the solution in your head. Repeat what you believe they said and give them your thoughts on what your solution to their problem might be. If you haven’t been able to weave the answer to all of your prospects’ problems, there’s nothing wrong with repeating what they need and telling them you’ll get them the answers in a short period of time. 3. Try soft selling – Whenever we’re at a tradeshow and sponsoring a booth, I ask my staff not to hard-sell our products. Why? Because we don’t have to. We give our online e-mail marketing product away for free. Sure, we have certain limitations on the time they get to use it, but it’s a full version of the product. So I put my money where my mouth is and tell people to try us against our competition to see what works best for them. They might find that there’s something in our competitor’s product that works better for their needs, and that’s OK. In the long run, we want happy customers, because happy customers tell their friends good things about us versus how frustrated they might be. So the next time you’re faced with a “selling” situation, try and put these three tactics to work and see if they close your next deal! Advertisement: Are your customers tuning you out?    In the digital age, mass marketing no longer gets the job done. Customers want to feel a personal connection. So how do you get your customers to tune in? View our video to see how Pitney Bowes can help you make a personal connection. http://www.personallypb.com Ads by Pheedo

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3 Tactics to Become a Better Salesperson

Two big Android handset makers had terrible quarters. HTC announced a 26% drop in profit from the previous year — its first such drop in two years — and Motorola warned that it would have only modest profits on smaller-than-expected revenue. But more important, both companies saw mobile phone unit sales drop from the previous quarter. HTC sold only 10 million units in the last three months of the year, down from 13.2 million in Q3, reports Bloomberg . And Motorola sold only 10.5 million, down from 11.6 million in the previous quarter (although smartphone sales were up slightly).

That’s exactly the opposite of what happens with most successful consumer products, where the holiday quarter is usually the biggest of the year.

Samsung , perhaps not wanting to be tarred with the same brush, pre-announced a fantastic quarter : it will earn $4.5 billion in operating profit, which is about 10% than analysts expected (according to Reuters ), and 22% higher than Q3. A lot of reports credited the strength to Samsung’s smartphone business.

That’s reasonable — Samsung passed Apple last quarter as the number-one smartphone maker in the world according to one estimate, and analysts are expecting big growth. But Samsung itself said nothing about smartphone sales in its note. Every report citing Samsung smartphone sales in Q4 are estimates from analysts. Guesses, if you will. But let’s assume that the Android market has one big winner — Samsung — and a lot of smaller players at the margin. Either way, the business of being an Android reseller is starting to look a lot like the traditional PC business.

Some hardware makers do great, others don’t, and the players change from year to year. But the big winner is always the platform provider.           Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook . Join the conversation about this story » See Also: UH-OH: The Company That Google Just Paid $12.5 Billion For Had An Awful Holiday Google Goes On The Offensive In Oracle Fight THE GOOGLE INVESTOR: Does The Weak European Ad Market Suggest A Google Miss?

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So How’s That "Bet On Android" Thing Working Out For You? (GOOG)

Your start-up may have crossed the threshold to viability. Now, the tough part begins. At the onset of 2012, many start-up executives around the world are sticking their copy of Lean Start-Up on the shelf, leaning back, and bemoaning the fact that they have a new set of challenges ahead of them. Although there is a plethora of advice now being given about how to find product-market fit for your fledging start-up, there’s a dirty little secret out there: Once you’ve achieved product-market fit, the hard work really begins. Scaling is hard. After three or four years of jamming on your start-up, you’ve finally crossed a few million in revenue, gotten north of 10-20 employees, and it’s all starting to click. Now the pressure really begins. Your employees start doing what I call “phantom equity math” (if this company were worth a billion dollars, I’d become a multimillionare!), your VCs shift you in their mental models from “too early to tell” to “high return potential” and your spouse starts asking about when all that hard work is going to really pay off. Yet, the hard scaling challenges and decisions that will enable true value creation, not just interim progress, are all ahead of you. Here are four of the top ones that I see start-ups wrestle with once they start seeing their initial revenue projections finally come to fruition: 1. Product strategy: Stay focused vs broaden the footprint The initial product is working well and now the question is how broad a product strategy should you pursue? If you think the total available market (TAM) for the existing product is large enough to satisfy yours and your investor’s ambitions, stay focused. But, typically, the allure of pursuing the bigger win draws founders into ambitious efforts to broaden their product footprint through organic development efforts or even M&A. My partner, Chip Hazard , likes to refer to the broadening efforts as the “lily-pad strategy”: Focus on jumping on to a lily pad next to you rather than across the entire pond. By pursuing natural adjacencies, a company can increase its TAM—ideally by leveraging existing customers (meet their needs more broadly), channels (given them more things to sell), or products (extend the current prodcut footprint with natural adjacent add-ons). I’m often surprised that companies don’t think through the basics of competitive strategy when evaluating these adjacent opportunities. At the risk of getting some eye rolls for evoking Michael Porter , I encourage start-up CEOs to think carefully about the new lily pad’s competitive intensity, entrance threats, threats of substitute products, as well as the power of suppliers and customers when evaluating the adjacent opportunities. 2. Financial strategy: Exit vs raise additional capital Once things are working well, there is a magnetic power that demands pouring more fuel onto the fire. If the customer acquisition costs (CAC) are proving out to be $1 and the customer’s lifetime value (LTV) are $2, why not raise millions of dollars to acquire more customers? Obviously, it’s not that easy a decision. Raising capital can be a hugely distracting, draining process, and the dilution implications, as well as the choice of investors, has deep repercussions on your future options. On the other hand, pursuing an early exit can be appealing, particularly if the entrepreneur has never had a win before, but there are many difficult considerations here as well, which I touch on in a blog post ( Walking Away From Liquidity ) as does Roger Ehrenberg ( To Sell or Not To Sell ). 3. Human capital strategy: Hire grownups vs stay young There is a certain charm and many benefits to the founding team sticking together and scaling with the start-up. The culture remains true to the founding core, the young talented employees get growth opportunities, and there’s an appeal to minimizing the disruption that outsiders bring. Yet, frequently, the talented founding team that gets you to the point of scaling is not the right team to lead the scaling process. I refer to the three stages of a start-up’s life as “the jungle,” “the dirt road,” and “the highway”. The team that is skilled at hacking its way through the jungle is often not as well-suited to accelerate rapidly once a dirt road has been discovered. Yet when more senior, experienced executives arrive, preserving the founding culture, and maintaining alignment is critical. The best companies build teams for scale early on (e.g., hiring great VPs who can be both effective players and coaches as their department grows) and work hard to select for cultural fit (Google’s top recruiter, Mike Junge, had a great interview on hiring best practices in PE Hub, Why It Pays To Be Nice ). 4. Founder’s dilemma: Bring in a professional CEO? Ultimately, one of the biggest decisions a scaling young company makes is: Who should be the CEO? The founder may be one of the uniquely talented individuals who can scale from the jungle all the way through the highway, but more often than not, a senior, professional CEO is hired to help take the company to the next level. This decision is truly make or break. It rests on the founder’s desires as well as the board’s confidence in his or her ability to transition from a product-centric, pre-product-market fit world to a sales-and-marketing execution-centric, post product-market-fit world. Investors would always prefer to see the founder make that transition, but if the skillset isn’t there, having an orderly transition with open communication is key. HBS Professor Noam Wasserman has written a series of cases on this topic that show some of the do’s and don’ts of navigating this transition. It’s never an easy one to embark on. Each of these decisions can be gut-wrenching, bet the company moves. There’s a nasty image I hear used in the boardroom about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. If things are going well, you want to let them evolve naturally and achieve some measure of victory, albeit a small one. This may mean sticking with a founding leadership team, a niche product strategy, and selling early. Why should each of these decisions sound limiting? Because great entrepreneurs are competitive, ambitious types who attract ambitious management teams, advisors, and investors. There’s a natural allure to moving aggressively to scale once the initial product-market fit assumptions become validated. Just scale wisely. Going from $1 million to $10 million in revenue is no easier than achieving that initial $1 million. And getting to $100 million and beyond, well now you’re really in the rarified air that gets the people around you—and sets expectations soaring higher.

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Scaling A Business Is Hard

Some sales stars are master manipulators who can rack up big numbers–but at the cost of long-term growth. I recently read a blog post giving the following characteristics of “ quota-crushing sales pros ”: “They have no time for anything that is not their deal.” “Charming one minute, in-your-face the next, pros will use all emotional tools to win.” “They save the charm for the prospects and clients and the venom for your company.” “They’re never satisfied … ever.” This list was presented as if these were desirable characteristics, justified by the fact that such individuals could consistently “crush” their quotas, presumably making them more productive than their peers. Unfortunately, the presence of this kind of person on your sales team is generally a huge mistake. Yeah, he’ll book lots of revenue, but it’s probably because he’s 1) shafting your customers, or 2) shafting your company. Or more likely both. Let’s talk about customers first. While aggressive selling can win new customers, it seldom builds long-term relationships. Customers end up feeling manipulated into buying things that they neither want nor need, and consequently decide to buy elsewhere in the future. Companies that depend upon “quota crushers” to make revenue generally end up with little or no customer loyalty. As a result, they are forced to constantly acquire new customers. While the “quota buster” is good at this, it costs a lot more money to get a new customer than to sell to an existing one. And eventually word gets around, making new sales harder and harder to achieve. Sales superstars can also be a huge productivity drain on the rest of your company because often their success lies not in superior sales technique but in a superior ability to manipulate their own company’s resources, according to research by Arun Sharma at the University of Miami. In some cases, the superstars (who tend to account for 20% of a typical sales team) consumed as much as 50% of the firm’s internal resources. Since those resources would otherwise be supporting the rest of the team, the superstar’s revenue could be chalked up to “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” This is why sales superstars are often unpopular among their peers. While management may be convinced that their success is the result of great sales skills, the rest of the team suspects that the superstar is simply hogging resources. (A common complaint: “He gets all the easy leads.”) The operative word here is “manipulate.” Some sales superstars (and the managers who enable them) truly believe that selling is the process of manipulating people: customer and fellow-employees alike. To that way of thinking, selling is something that you do to people, not something you do for people. And while that may result in “quota crushing”, it’s not a long-term strategy, except for con men working in boiler rooms. Does this mean that every sales superstar is bad for business? Of course not. There are definitely salespeople who can make big sales numbers without manipulating people. But these “superstars” have none of the characteristics identified in the original post. Instead: They always have time for their customers, even when it’s not strictly business. They are committed to doing the right thing, even if it means losing the sale. They treat both customers and fellow employees with respect and consideration. In the short term, they might not make as many sales as the “quota crushers”–but when they’re done selling, your company has a loyal customer base, not a hundred furious (and probably vocal) customers who think they got the shaft. And your employee morale won’t be in the toilet. Note: Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting columns to help you locate the kind of “superstar” that’s not bad for business. So stay tuned.

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Beware of Sales ‘Superstars’

Strong demand for fuel-efficient diesel models helped Indian auto makers shun slowdown in the market in the final month of 20011.

Mumbai-based Tata Motors sold 28,916 cars in December 2011, 47 per cent up from 19,699 units sold in the corresponding period of previous year.

Sales of Tata Nano jumped 29 per cent to 7,466 units, while Indica sales climbed 57 per cent to settle at 9,307 units. Total sales including trucks and buses climbed 22 per cent to 82,278 units in December 2011 over December
2010.

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The Apple Investor is a daily report from SAI.

Sign up here to receive it by email . AAPL Still Battling XOM For Market Cap King Last week was good to Apple, which closed above $400 for the first time since early November. But the stock gained little ground in its running battle with Exxon Mobil for the market cap championship, as the rise in crude prices has pushed the oil giant up as well. Catalysts for Apple include iPhone upgrade cycles and adoption; update to the iPad in early 2012; continued market share growth of the Mac business line; penetration in China and emerging markets; the evolution and potential re-conception of Apple TV ; and platforms such as Siri, mobile advertising (iAd), books and publishing, gaming, mapping and social ( Ping ).

Shares of Apple trade at 8.9x Enterprise Value / Trailing Twelve Months Free Cash Flow (including long-term marketable securities). Will Apple Make The Perfect TV While Google TV Continues To Disappoint? (The Perfection Paradox) The single biggest reason Google TV didn’t work was it didn’t solve any of the biggest shortcomings of our living room television viewing experience. Apple, meanwhile, will approach the market with the aim of making TV simple again, by making the “perfect” TV. Henry Blodget at Business Insider says that TV users just want to press “on” and watch what they want to watch .

That’s it.

Steve Jobs probably figured out how to allow TV users to press “on” and then say, “The Jets game,” or “Addams Family” or “The next Sopranos episode” or “our Hawaii vacation videos” and have the TV just play them. If Apple can do that, they will have a massive hit. iOS Mobile Devices Accounted For Over 90% Of December Mobile Retail Sales (RichRelevance) iPads and iPhones accounted for over 92% of online retail sales not originating from a desktop device for December, according to RichRelevance, easily beating out Android .

Shoppers on Apple devices were also willing to spend more, with an average order value of $123 versus Android’s $101 (that’s 19% more). Mobile shopping is still a drop in the bucket compared to desktop shopping, with just 3.7% of total online retail dollars spent in the U.S. Goes to show that the browsing experience is key to mobile commerce. Why Isn’t Safari Growing Like Chrome? ( TechCrunch ) Remember Safari ? While Google’s Chrome has skyrocketed from obscurity in 2008 to over 25% last month, Apple’s web browser lingers somewhere between 5-8%. But Why? Windows ? But Safari has actually been available for Windows quite a bit longer than Chrome has been.

Speed? Chrome is know for being the fastest browser available in terms of both page rendering and JavaScript performance. Promotion? Or lack thereof. Google does quite a bit of promotion for its browser. However, Safari being bundled by default with iTunes should have helped it gain massive Windows market share. Extensions? Safari has had them as well since mid-2010.

That said, Chrome’s extensions are better and much more plentiful. Neglect? Apple is more inclined to throw resources at native work rather than web work. Of course, this could all change if devices like the iPad really are the future of general purpose computing. A New Era Is Coming For Apple In 2012 (paidContent) Apple will remain the most compelling story in tech not just because of the iPhone and its cousin, the iPad, but because of the immense pressure on CEO Tim Cook and Apple’s management team to live up to the standard set by a legend.

This quarter will be the first full quarter that Cook and his lieutenants will have been in charge of Apple. And the company has never been stronger, and Cook has been auditioning for this job for several years.

The company could make or break mobile payments this year and revolutionize the way we watch TV. It’s hard to imagine Apple losing steam in 2012. Get Ready For Apple’s Monster Quarter, And The Stock To Soar (Seeking Alpha) Apple is unique among America’s mega caps due to the company’s ongoing rates of revenue and earnings growth.

That said, the rate of Apple’s share price appreciation has fallen behind the rate of earnings growth over the past four quarters. Despite the 83% growth in earnings per share in fiscal 2011, at Apple’s closing price of $403.33 last week, the share price has risen only 25% year-over-year.

There’s a disconnect between the perceived limits to Apple’s continuing strong growth and the reality of the company’s potential for growth. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook . Join the conversation about this story » See Also: Here’s Why The Apple TV Might Be Awesome And Google TV Will Continue To Suck…

THE MICROSOFT INVESTOR: Stagnant Shares Are No Reason To Ignore In Microsoft THE GOOGLE INVESTOR: Why Google+ Is Now A Must For Businesses

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THE APPLE INVESTOR: 2012 Will Usher In A New Era For Apple (AAPL)