Multinational conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa has published results for the first half of 2012.

Net profit was down 78% to 10.21 billion Hong Kong dollars, although last year’s figure had been boosted by the company selling some of its port assets. Revenue for the six months rose 6% to HK$194.99 billion.

Sony has published results for the first quarter of its financial year, with sales up 1.4% year-on-year to 1,515.2 billion yen (around £12,448 million).

However, part of this increase was due to its creation of Sony Mobile from the Sony Ericsson venture. Operating profit fell by 77% to 6.28 billion yen

Amazon.com has updated its cloud-based music player - which is currently only for US-based customers - by giving it the ability to ‘scan and match’ music from other sources. It means the service will have similar abilities to the streaming music players offered by Apple iTunes and Google Music.

In order to offer the music matching service the company has signed  agreements with Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and more than 150 independent distributors, aggregators and music publishers.

Preliminary figures from the International Data Corporation estimate that worldwide tablet shipments for the second quarter of 2012 reached 25 million units, up 33.6% from the first quarter of 2012 and up 66.2% year-on-year.

Once again, Apple was the largest tablet producer, shipping 17 million iPad devices during the quarter. In fact, all the top four tablet vendors saw year-on-year growth.

New research prepared by Mobidia Technology and Informa Telecoms & Media has revealed that 4G LTE availability is stimulating increased data usage, not just on the 4G networks but also by 4G devices using WiFi networks.

The study involved a sample of the 1.5 million international users who have downloaded Mobidia’s 'My Data Manager' smartphone application.