Sorry Maurice. Yes, I suppose that if my 3G datarate overwhelmed your analog antennae you would see me exceed the Shannon limit. LOL...
In such a spirit, perhaps I should apologize and take it slower.
Firstly, it seems you don't know Jack about inflation (although Jack does), and it's not as though the choice is between the mattress and QCOM. It's between the mattress and QCOM and an almost infinite variety of other financial instruments all one way or another claiming to be asset backed. Including my son's lemonade stand.
As to my over (or under) estimate of subscribers, order of magnitude math is difficult to get precise. If I round my numbers with a chain-saw you will always be able to spot imprecision. But Maurice, if you allow reality to intrude into your world for a moment you might notice that my math was being kind to Q!. As imprecise as I admit to have been.
But perhaps not. So let me introduce just two of those things I dismissed. First, a shareholder's legitimate expectation of after-inflation profit at say a meagre 7%/year for 25 years which gives us a slightly larger ending value. Ok, it's not 45 Billion it's 250 Billion. If you want 10%/year (which I think is asking too much), well the ante goes up to 450 Billion. And so on.
And now let's talk about profit erosion. I introduce the term "subscriber dollars". Because it's dollars that are important, not just mammalian warmpth.
Hmmm... you said that subs have gone from 1 to 100 million in 4 years. Yet Q's revenue has grown by less than 2x in the same period, and net margins by 5x. These are both vastly smaller than 100x. Which means that subscriber-dollars are deflating faster than you can say "John was being generous to Q!".
So please don't nitpick a few billion people with me. Otherwise I will take my generosity away. If I introduce absolute dollars per subscriber per year... well, it appears that even if every speech-capable mammal on the planet becomes a subscriber, the odds of Q! generating a return to their shareholders in excess of what they could earn elsewhere... well, it's still low. I'll leave it at that.
Notice I didn't even bother discussing whether 3G is fiction, fantasy or future. I'll leave that for when Chain saw math shows it's a worthwhile discussion to speculate like that.
John. |
