IBM names Arvind Krishna as CEO, starting 6 April 2020, following the retirement of Virginia Rometty. One of the most prominent female tech leaders, Rometty stays at Big Blue as Chairman of the Board until end 2020.

"Ginni has provided outstanding leadership for IBM, substantially transforming the company and ushering in a new cloud and cognitive era," the company says.  "She has taken bold strategic actions to reposition IBM for the future, shedding businesses and growing new units organically and through acquisition, all while achieving record diversity and employee engagement and setting the industry standard for responsible technology ethics and data stewardship."

Samsung appoints a replacement for DJ Koh as smartphone division CEO-- Roh Tae-Moon, a former mobile development head and the 3rd CEO for the division in the past 12 years, follow DJ Koh and JK Shin.

At age 51, Roh Tae-Moon is the youngest president at the S. Korean giant. His promotion, according to Reuters, comes as part of a later-than-usual reshuffle amid a series of court cases involving a number of top Samsung execs, including leader Jay. Y Lee. Roh Tae-Moon led development of the successful Galaxy line of devices, and championed the shift to outsource more handset production.

Samsung remains the leader in terms of global mobile marketshare, but it faces tightening competition at the lower and mid-tiers of the market form the likes of Huawei, Vivo and Oppo. As such, Roh Tae-Moon has the tough job of ensuring the S. Korean company's relevance, especially after recent stumbles such as the Galaxy Fold.

Earlier this week Xerox managed to get a financial backing worth $33 billion in order acquire one of its biggest rivals in the printer business, HP. However HP refuses offer, and insists Xerox bid is in no way enough.

"Your letter dated January 6, 2020 regarding financing does not address the key issue-- that Xerox's proposal significantly undervalues HP-- and is not a basis for discussion," a statement from HP CEO Enrique Lores and Board Chair Chip Bergh says. The letter in question comes from Xerox CEO John Visentin, and describes how the company managed to get financing commitment for the aforementioned $24bn from Citigroup, Mizuho Financial Group and Bank of America.

For the curious, Wall Street estimates HP is worth £30 billion, a valuation far bigger than Xerox's $7.7bn.

Intel announces the sale of the "majority" of its smartphone modem business is now complete-- a deal Reuters reports was done at a "multi-billion dollar loss," despite a $1 billion pricetag.

First confirmed back in July 2019, the acquisition brings a slew of mobile modem technology to the Apple fold. As a result, the iPhone maker will be able to create such iDevice components in-house, rather than depend on the likes of Qualcomm. The deal only covers smartphone modems, and Intel is still able to make modems for PCs, IoT devices and autonomous vehicles.

But why did Intel offload the smartphone modem business? A brief filed with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has a couple of clues. According to the filing, Intel was forced out of the smartphone modem market by... Qualcomm. Intel claims Qualcom "strangled competition" through possibly unfair patent licensing practices, leading to "artificial and insurmountable barriers" not even the biggest PC chipmaker in the world could, well, surmount.

LG Electronics announces an executive shakeup-- one seeing the promotion of Brian Kwon, head of the Mobile Communications and Home Entertainment wings of the company formerly known as Lucky Goldstar, to CEO.

Other promotions include Park Hyoung-sei as president of the Home Entertainment Company, new Mobile Communications Company president Morris Lee, William Cho in the newly created Chief Strategy Officer position and Chief Financial Officer Bae Doo-yong.

An LG veteran, Kwon has been at Goldstar since 1987. He held a variety of positions, including business planning at LG Wales and head of the monitor division, before promotion to oversee the Home Entertainment Company in 2014. He was born in Busan and received a bachelor's degree from Seoul National University and an MBA from Aalto University, Finland.

As 5G starts to hit the mainstream Intel partners with MediaTek in the development, certification and support of PC modem solutions able to handle this next generation of wireless connectivity.

The partnership has MediaTek develop and produce a 5G modem based on an Intel solution specification. In addition, Intel will also provide optimisation and validation across the platform, and lend system integration and co-engineering support to further enable OEM partners.

“5G is poised to unleash a new level of computing and connectivity that will transform the way we interact with the world," Chipzilla says. "This partnership with MediaTek brings together industry leaders with deep engineering, system integration and connectivity expertise to deliver 5G experiences on the next generation of the world’s best PCs.”

Nvidia reports fiscal Q3 2020 (ending 27 October 2019) revenues reaching $3.014 billion-- a -5% Y-o-Y decline, but a slight increase compared to the $2.58bn of the previous quarter, making it better than the more pessimistic expectations of Wall Street.

"Our gaming business and demand from hyperscale customers powered Q3's results," the company says. "The realism of computer graphics is taking a giant leap forward with Nvidia RTX. This quarter, we have laid the foundation for where AI will ultimately make the greatest impact. We extended our reach beyond the cloud, to the edge, where GPU-accelerated 5G, AI and IoT will revolutionise the world’s largest industries. We see strong data center growth ahead, driven by the rise of conversational AI and inference.”

Apple is working on a "range" of augmented and virtual reality devices, Bloomberg reports, with unnamed "people familiar with the plans" adding the iPhone maker is basing such hardware on a new 3D sensor system.

The first device using the 3D sensor system is the 2020 iPad Pro update-- one featuring a 2-camera module and a "small hole" housing the 3D system. It should allow users to create "3D reconstructions of rooms, object and people," and will eventually be available in the high end 5G-capable iPhones set for launch next year.