John, why would they want to borrow a few $$billion? To get retail therapy. As you point out, a lot of shareholders are happier for QUALCOMM to invest their money than to do it themselves. That's pretty much the definition of a shareholder.
As you also point out, Q! has raised a lot of cash by offering shares to people. Little of their money has come from retained CDMA earnings so far. But keep in mind that CDMA is still in infancy with the first 100 million subscribers only just achieved having come from 1 million only 4 years ago and none a year before that.
Counting the crowds waiting for CDMA is a fishes and loaves issue. How the heck can Q! feed the hordes [6 billion or so] waiting for a feed of CDMA? Happily, cloning is already in action and works and people love clones. Cloning is the wealth of the world. Q! has come up with a great idea and that can now be cloned and squeezed into a cute little CDMA phone by Kyocera and Samsung [and many others]. Kyocera even delivers cyberspace via the 6035 [with a big screen of PalmPilot proportions]. When we can do human cloning, we'll be even better off! 'We' meaning the clones and the other people alive at the time, hopefully including me. But that remains in the investigation stage.
Q! is out to make CDMA ubiquitous. A CDMA chip on every desk, in every pocket, in every car, in every home and every room, in every aircraft, boat, train, truck, bus, schoolroom, in every skull [screwed to the bone behind each ear - two for redundancy in case one gets damaged - if two get damaged, the person will be usually dead], in every sheep and other roaming animal, in sensors everywhere where there is something to be sensed [see graviton.com ] and probably somewhere else too.
To achieve ubiquity, they need to finance, design and build such things. Hence they have funded many companies to help propagate CDMA. For example NetZero, Globalstar, 724 Solutions, PayPal, handspring, inViso, SnapTrack, Eudora, etc. Some of them don't seem to do very well. But life's not perfect and neither are investments. They also develop things like BREW to help make CDMA attractive.
<Nevertheless, the most recent 10-K shows about 871,090 K$ cumulative retained earnings from stuff vaguely related to CDMA technology >
That's not enough to buy everything, but the money coming in over the next few years, of which that is just a wavelet, will be like a tsunami, even with reducing average selling prices and ASIC competition. The CDMA financial wave function will be huge. It's orthogonality spectacular.
They could just call it a day and hand all the money back to shareholders or they can continue to use a lot of it, and borrow more to help Uncle Al dispose of his freshly printed greenbacks, to accelerate the demand for and profits from CDMA.
The new shareholders have previously been busted by the dot.gones and eaten alive by the GSM Guild hagfish. They've followed wacky ideas indiscriminately which have been IPO'ed with the flimsiest foundations. Now, as they survey the techwreck, they see that in Mighty Q! there really is an income, there really is some cash in the bank, there really is demand and the technology really works and people really like it and there are a LOT of people who can afford $200 for a swanky CDMA phone and cyberspace connection which will cost 4c a minute to use [Leap Wireless for example].
Synchronicitatiously,
Mq
PS: Note "It's" apostrophe bait for Jon and Uncle Franq. I wonder if they'll be caught...my guess is Jon will give up before getting that far. Franq will think 'Aha! Got 'im! H'mmm I wonder if it was deliberate....[read]...[read]...D'oh!" |
