Just a heads up about QCOM... they are in complete chaos here in San Diego... it seems the son of the founder, who has been running the company, just isn't as good as his dad at making the big decisions...
I bailed all of our QCOM when they first announced the hostile take-over bid by a Chinese company and a lot of other stuff started coming out, too... my friend (retired director of R&D at QCOM) took early retirement at that point and sold all of his stock -- QCOM has had multiple waves of offering employees who met certain conditions generous packages to retire early.
The announcement by AAPL that they were going to establish a campus of 1,500 or so engineers specializing in radio/modem hardware design... that number is almost exactly the number of employees laid off -- layoffs vs. early retirement -- after voluntary "buyout" packages for employees dried up, they began actual layoffs.
Seems clear to me that AAPL (remembering they have a few legal disputes with QCOM and also said they were dropping QCOM chip sets from their phones and going all Intel) that AAPL is going head hunting for people at QCOM.
I don't know, QCOM seems to be fighting a lot of issues -- local news focuses a lot of time/resources on QCOM as it is one of the larger companies here...
I have no idea what will happen at QCOM in the future... I just know that the constant flood of problems they are going through of late, some of their own making, does not give me confidence... to be clear, when Irwin Jacobs ran it, it was a profit/money machine and my position did very very well... but things seemed to change there quite a bit when Irwin's son took the helm.
As for the quality of QCOM's chips? They are the best, no question... however, Sony's betamax was superior to VHS in all but maybe 1 or 2 ways, but VHS won the war, dooming betamax to niche applications. Companies that make the best stuff don't always reflect that in their financials, sales numbers and stock price and can be quite frustrating. |
