Ripples From the Cellphone’s Splash

The cellphone is beginning to have the kind of impact on industry that has been seen with only a few products, like the car or big kitchen appliances. The ripple effect showed up this week in a number of corporate earnings reports.

Corning said that its quarterly profit surged 41 percent, in part because of rising sales of its unusually strong Gorilla Glass, which is used in smartphone displays. Gorilla Glass, which is used in roughly 200 million mobile devices, produced about $250 million in revenue for Corning in 2010. James B. Flaws, the company’s chief financial officer, told analysts that Gorilla Glass could generate $1 billion in revenue this year.

Kodak reported its earnings and noted that quarterly revenue from its digital business, which includes its camera unit, slid 25 percent from a year ago. Kodak executives partly blamed competition from cellphones, which are causing serious trouble in the market for low-end point-and-shoot digital cameras, the type that Kodak makes.