Maurice: Your devotion to Qualcomm is remarkable, bordering on "fanatical". But your arguments are bordering on surreal.
You are re-packaging the theory that says "earnings would be better if we weren't spending so much". To which the short answer is "and if wishes were horses then beggars would ride".
Ok, try my math out slightly differently using revenues instead of earnings. Forget that this is unreal and that no company on the planet has ever achieved sustainable 100% net margins.
You get a similar result. Instead of a 20:1 discrepancy, it's only a 5:1 discrepancy. Sure, it's slightly less of a stretch that the company could be worth 45 Billion dollars if one paid for cost-free revenue. But that's a big if that should probably over stretch even your remarkably elastic imagination.
It doesn't work.
I see you have at least begun to temper your 6 Billion folks down to 3 billion folks. Which is a start in the right direction. But you seem persistent in your view about everyone demanding a CDMA phone, blissfully dismissing the viability of substitutes.
See, I have a wireless phone and it works quite fine. I talk into one end and the other person's voice comes out the other end. So I can't figure out what all the fuss about these letters is. Maybe someone will teach me some day why I personally care. CDMA, TDMA, PCS, GSM... geez. It's a small black thing with a screen I use to contact people with.
More important, don't bother teaching me, someone should teach all those dumb europeans why they care. Yah, right. Like that's going to happen in a million years.
Here's where you are dead wrong. Consumers will not pull CDMA. What I care about as a consumer isn't the technology, it's more the utility of the device and who provides it to me and for what price. And there are ways to get wireless data to me that don't involve CDMA. Even if I needed it. Which at the moment, I don't.
We've survived on this planet for tens of thousands of years or so without wireless internet and I'm sure the human race will keep on surviving for a few more years until someone figures out how to deliver it effectively the way they want to do so, and (probably more importantly), precisely what it is I will do with it. Which is probably why 3G hasn't swept the globe, come to think of it.
Maurice, as remarkable as Qualcomm (the company) is and as potent it's technology and as far-reaching as its patent portfolio... it's going to earn a lot of money. But possibly not enough so that I'd want to fork out $60 for one seven hundred and fifty millionth.
And the reason isn't technology. It's business.
John.
[EDIT: I do think we will see wireless everything before my son graduates school by the way, so I am not one of these technophobes. I am not addressing the viability of Qualcomm's business, merely commenting on the value of the share price. Which appears to me to be slightly high. I have no position in Qualcomm either.] |
