I think you got it wrong. Fighting was a matter of survival --not a lack of concessions or winning battles with just symbolic significance.
What would have been the right thing to do in the case of Apple?
GTAT, Dialog Semi, Imagination, Countless App Store Devs who got "Sherlocked" had stake holder values gutted to pad Apple's margins.
Qualcomm survived and diversified, arguably flourishing where it did (RFFE, autos).
What about ARM?
Would it have been better to sign a deal that locked Q into using ARM IP across its SoC or destroy Nuvia's designs completely despite having a legitimate ALA? There would have been minimal differentiation from Mediatek's product line not only in CPU, but also in GPU, DSP, ISP... a modem would have been the only differentiator.
And nVidia?
They'd be even more powerful with ARM in their pockets and would likely have dug deeper into data centers and the edge than they have now.
I also think Qualcomm's licensing of NVLink was a well played and reasonable "concession" as well and nVidia wouldn't have effectively bought Groq if it believed in its own architecture or its ability to pivot for the likely much larger market of inferencing.
I'm not saying Qualcomm has been a good investment (I'd also be disappointed if it were my biggest), but they do operate in a tough space with few good choices at times but to fight, and they have been targeted because of their still enviable position in the industry --if I wanted to actually make the infrastructure or devices of the future, I'd want the pieces of expertise that Qualcomm specifically has.
Qualcomm just isn't being fairly valued for their forward cashflows given both their dominant industry track record and shrewd investments for future markets where they have been temporarily but not permanently hamstrung. I still think they hold all the right cards to dominate the edge and the efficiency to make inferencing data centers on the scale imagined actually feasible --the markets have temporarily voted up participants in data center projects whose scale and power requirements have a snowball's chance in hell of actually working.
So I'll rely instead on the fact that the markets are a value weighing machine in the long run, and that Q's industry trajectory looks to be quite different from the market's current love of carnival barkers and unscalable science experiments. I think it's NOT wise to be on the WRONG side of the trade as Hock Tan, so I'll be recognizing its value in buying it during the dips (which are indeed trending higher over the years of withering attacks) rather than hoping to sell it on the cheap because of floaty, symbolic arguments.
I'll give y'all this though, despite Amon shrewd corporate policies, he could seriously use some speech coaching for his public interviews. This is another thing I'm hoping hurts more in the short run than the long. |
