Jay, CDMA ASICs are owned by QUALCOMM and backed by USS Enterprise, a formidable beast, with Captain Brent Scowcroft riding shotgun. The low cost CDMA phones are because the rest of the phone is cheap, made by commodity people, whereas the sacred core, the ASIC, is made for QUALCOMM by commodity chip makers and sold at much higher prices than GSM and other options, which are wayyyyy less attractive for various reasons. It's a licence to print money.
You misunderstand if you think CDMA = commodity. Yes, communication is a commodity, but there are good ways, and bad ways, expensive and cheap ways of doing it. QUALCOMM's way is cheap and good but with very high margins, because it is so much more efficient than alternatives. The economies of scale now swung behind it make it unstoppable. Until something else comes along, the patents eventually expire and so on, which will happen about 2015. But they are not standing still and might invent those next things!
$1,200 for Au? That's only 4x the current price. Heck, I'm looking for 100 baggers. Okay, 10 baggers will do. Plus, I don't like the spread for gold and the other stuff - can't just click on my bar and sell it. If gold only gets to $500, that's not even a doubling. Less the spread and storage costs, I might walk away with a loss!
There's even a chance that Au will just sit at $300 or maybe $400 an ounce for the next decade if we don't go from Crunch to Pandemonium. I'm getting tired of waiting for Pandemonium [it's been over two years now since the slide began - this is a very slow and tortuous process; yes, I'm aware that Japan took a decade and is perhaps not finished].
Mqurice |
