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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM)
QCOM 154.12-3.3%3:59 PM EST
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To: Elroy Jetson who wrote (8265)2/9/1998 3:31:00 PM
From: tero kuittinen  Read Replies (5) of 152472
 
The problem is, Qualcomm already has driven the major phone manufacturers away with it's greedy attitude. It is telling that the Motorola CDMA phone which was supposed to hit the streets last summer still is suspended. The cutting edge Startac CDMA version isn't even rumoured about. Anyone who knows about Nokia's handheld technology has been puzzled about the decision to base Nokia's CDMA phone on the nearly obsolete half-decade old 2100 platform. The technological development of CDMA phones simply hasn't taken off. And when you have half a dozen biggest manufacturers giving a standard like CDMA a cold shoulder you inevitably will see a stunting effect.
The line about high end phones selling badly sounds deeply weird. In GSM phones the most lucrative segment is the most expensive, recently introduced models costing well above 500 dollars. Nokia was able to recoup the entire R&D costs of its 9000 model in ten months... while selling the phone at nearly 2000$ street price. How on earth can the Q phone be stalling this early? Ericsson's 788 was the monster hit of 1997 while being priced at 600 dollars or so. Nokia's new 6100 models are priced at 600 dollars as well... and there are waiting lists of a couple of weeks for the frenzied customers in many European countries.
The post about Qualcomm CDMA hitting 160 million users by 2003 is completely out of line with all of the independent forecasts I have seen. The posts about how CDMA could invade Europe display a certain worrisome detachment from reality. W-CDMA means that narrow-band CDMA will never become even a niche market in Europe. This standard is already embraced by all of the *operators* in Europe and in most of Asia. The operators are already committed to start the upgrading from GSM in two to four years. There are *no* plans whatsoever by any of the major European operators of suddenly importing a diverging standard completely out of step with the rest of the continent. Meanwhile, GSM is continuing the red hot infrastructure expansion now that the future of the standard is assured. This is what the W-CDMA is about - not rendering GSM obsolete in near future but assuring the customers that there is a well-planned upgrade arriving, backed by all of the major manufacturers of both handsets and infrastructure as well as all of the major operators.
There is a deeply surreal quality about the insistence that Qualcomm will somehow play a pivotal role in W-CDMA. All of the reports published by knowledgeable newspapers, trade publications and business weeklies here in Europe take the view that Qualcomm is badly sidelined by W-CDMA. And there is *one* item published by a flag-waving Qualcomm newsletter hinting that Qualcomm is somehow central in the W-CDMA. And this is taken as evidence that the Nokia-Ericsson consortium somehow depends on Qualcomm technology? Please. If this is so, where is the information about that? Don't you think that the company would have mentioned sonething about this while it was stunning the international investment community by last week's announcement? Anyone really thinks that Nokia and Ericsson would take the W-CDMA development this far, after six years of heavy R&D and only now notice that Qualcomm holds some mysterious key ingredient?

Tero

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