Let me offer a single voice of dissent here
You can't kid a kidder. There's plenty of shareholders on this board that still steadfastly support this management team. At least I would like to give you credit for putting forth rationale for that support. I didn't know Q doubled their cash in that period. Which scares me even more about this management team. Thus, Q's cash should have at least tripled to $30B; if it had been managed correctly-or at least be $25B. I don't need to outline all the sour investments that has dragged the cash down from $30B to $20B: but these come quickly to mind: Qualcomm Ventures, which started a $500M investment fund. I don't even know if QVI is around anymore.Certainly the investments have no significant ROI.Other investments: Snaptrack, that's a billion, Globastar-who knows, Broadcomm - that's a billion when u add the settlement and legal fees together, Triginex which Q bought in 2004, and at the end of last year announced that the last 45 engineers remaining in the company were being made "redundent"; Q chat - Sprint announced at the end of last year that no new Q-chat handsets were on the product development map; Media-flow-sunk costs certainly over a billion now (but given a chance for some return on the principal); mirasol -altho the jury is out, I don't give it much chance to be profitable for years to come; reduced royalty rates negotiated by the management team-billions; excessive compensation to sr. management in the form of salary, bonus, stock grants and options-hundreds of millions, excessive IR&D expenditures, etc. ......this should be enough to get me a few more "ignores". Actually the best I can hope for is that Q goes back to its roots,spins off QCT & QLT to a suitor with a capable management team and lets QWI and QSI stay behind with Dr. Paul Jacobs and a few billion with which to play. Qualcomm and its management were extremely effective when they were a small-even a mid-cap company. Now they are a mature company, bureacratically run, desperately needing a transfusion (divestiture), or at least new blood (spin-off). There is absolutely no way the Qualcomm board headed by Jacobs and run by both Jacobs are going to replace Dr. Paul Jacobs and his management team. It's very difficult for a father to admit his mistakes. Irvin maybe defied the laws of physics, but he can't overcome the mistakes of human nature. i. |
