John:
...Someone's got to pay those of us who exercise stock options. Better you than me, IMHO. And personally, I'm quite glad that there are hordes of people determined not to try to figure out how much it's costing them...
I think we're flogging a dead horse here. Again, I acknowledge there's a cost to shareholders of employee stock options, both on the granting end and the exercise end, and that "cost to shareholders" has been debated on this thread for some time. Just because I don't agree with you on that "cost" or how it should be factored into the price I'm prepared to pay for a share of Qualcomm doesn't mean that I'm one of the "hordes of people determined not to try to figure out how much it's costing them". And if employee stock options were to be banished as part of employee compensation, then I guess shareholders would be bearing a similar cost due to the increased salaries/bonuses etc. that would needed to retain key employees in a competitive environment. Enough on this, let's just agree to disagree.
...As for billions of subscribers? Sure. But that's an incomplete perspective. What matters is subscriber dollars...
Qualcomm isn't in the subscriber/carrier business, they're in the business of providing handsets chipsets and collecting infrastructure/handset royalties for those subscribers. It's up to the carriers to structure their business to make a profit from each of those subscribers, which they seem to be able to do in China even as they push down into the lower income groups that I previously posted about, as China Mobile's (HK) most recent financial report shows (see slide 9):
chinamobilehk.com
Sure, Qualcomm's handset ASP's and chipset ASP's for these lower end markets are going to be lower than products for say Korea or the US, but they still contribute to revenues at the same GM's as lower ASP products, you just need more of them to make a billion in revenues or profits than you would for higher end subscribers. But not a factor of 5 or 10 more as you imply.
David T. |
