Hi Mike, That's my point - someone, namely Mr. Market, is disputing the biz case for QCOM. That's why I brought out the example of NOK. The reason NOK has gone up and QCOM has gone in the same post Sept. period is that investors have collectively bid up the NOK business model or voted in favor of it vis a vis QCOM. These people obviously didn't
but QCOM stock. Why is that? Valuation maybe but this market
has never been overly sensitive to valuation or March 2000
would never have happened. I think it's just plain ignorance. I can find plenty of household name stocks whose
valuation makes no sense. Take Intel, somebody raised estimates yesterday for '02 to .65. .that bumped the stock
up to 34. How different is this current multiple from QCOM's
and more importantly which has more room for error, which has less control over its own destiny, which owns its own
technology. Just look what AMD is doing to its business -there's no AMD nipping at QCOM's heals eroding its margin model from the bottom up. More importantly, ten years from now who would you rather be Intel or QCOM - are you sure
we are still going to be living in a PC centric world, or will their entire business be supplanted by a device that's
in your pocket. No QCOM ain't cheap - but it's definitely
"reasonable" particularly compared to the uniqueness
of its business model. Name one company with a more scalable business model - a piece of everybody's juice -
and the beauty of it is it's even patent protected. Even MSFT doesn't have that. Aren't they always ranting about
all their software that gets pirated. Ever seen a "knock-off" 1xrtt chipset on the street? Speaking of which is MSFT
cheap - was it ever in the past 17 years as a public company. And while we're at it guess who has as good or better margins? And who would you rather be ten years from now? In a networked world is it really that essential that we all have a bundle of MSFT apps residing in even our
desktops ( if there are still desktops)let alone the form
of operating system that is the lifeblood of MSFT. I bet
they'd kill to have 20% growth over the next ten years,
which this fool would posit ain't gonna happen. Any wonder then that MSFT is throwing money at anything that comes
along: media, cable, wireless, you name it. Their golden goose is getting long in the tooth. Those days when QCOM was
trading at one times revenues were misleading because they were still lugging around the infrastructure and handset
businesses which they had to be in in order to ensure that
CDMA took root as a standard. They were more than happy to
drop that load when the time was appropriate. If you adjust
for those items, back then QCOM was trading at about 10 time
revenues (the kind that are extremely profitable). That's
about where we are today. Even good old MSFT is in that
neighbourhood. What about growth? Can it do better that 20%?
The worst you can say about QCOM's business is that it treaded water these last two years (while everyone elses
cratered). Why? For one thing they were adding important
new markets (Japan, Latin America, etc. )so that even as growth in older markets slowed due to recessionary forces
there were still net adds. Now if were are indeed about to see an economic recovery there will be a cyclical upkick that will benefit QCOM in addition to additional newer
markets (China, Indian WLL). Then there's the product cycle
which of 1xrtt etc. which will positively affect ASP's
replacement rates, etc. That's not fully factored in the stock just as the future likely outcome of NOK isnt factored into that stock. Do you think that the average investor has even figured out that there's a difference in one wireless carrier versus another based on the technology running under the hood? What's ATT Wireless going to offer as Verizon, Sprint etc start flogging their data offerings?
Moreover, what are the economics of such offerings and
resultant competitive responses when one factors the economics of relative capacity and backward compatibility?
When the strong get stronger what happens to their growth rates? How much bigger will QCOM be when its economic sphere
if influence literally encompasses every part of the globe.
Unless you don't think this will happen during the present decade - how can the growth rate not be at least 20%. Then you ask - well when will that happen? Answer - it's already happening on a small scale - when will that scale ramp?
maybe this year, maybe next - but it will happen. So the risk is not quibbling about the low tick. I used to say that
years ago when this stock was in a tight range of 40-70 (before the 8:1split) that the entry price didn't matter because when you eventually looked back at the stock price graph
covering that period - it would all look like a flat line
whose price during that period was indistinguishable.
best |
