Maurice:
My "jumpiness" does not, as you might think, derive from unsettled investors, but rather reflects frustration arising from the continued onslaught of misinformation and misunderstanding. For example, although some issues in the 3G debate are really pretty straightforward and obvious, I can attest to the fact that confusion reigns (particularly given the number of private emails that I received over my Star Trek metaphor).
For the record, the point of my little story was that despite all the hype, positioning and marketing smoke-and-mirrors, Ericsson is not, and cannot, unilaterally dictate the 3G standard because it requires Qualcomm's IPR. That fact is being demonstrated empirically BY ALL THE SOUND AND FURY COMING FROM THE DEBATE. All the noise must be a chimera else QC would have been excluded from the debate already. This is actually pretty obvious, but it requires conviction and intuition to see the forest for the trees.
With regard to the scarce PCS 'Q' phones, I know that GTE's PCS operation picked up the 'Q' line and that Qualcomm was shipping units to them from inventory. I suspect that QPE's manufacturing operation is capacity constrained given demand for the QCP family and the ramp of 800mhz, dual mode 'Q's. The demand for the latter seems to be quite extraordinary and I know the company is committing substantial resources to its timely introduction and volume production.
It should not be surprising (or alarming) that some carriers are not selling Qualcomm handsets. Not considering the capacity lost to new product launches, QPE's current production limit is around 1.5mm handsets per quarter. I think all of us expect net CDMA subscriber additions for 1998 to be far in excess of 6mm (with gross adds, considering subscriber churn, to be 10%-15% higher still). Consequently, QC could not possibly meet all the demand, nor would this be desirable since it would potentially impair the economics for other CDMA handset vendors (who buy QC ASICs and pay nice royalties). Finally, one should remember that depending on the model (QCP or 'Q'), Qualcomm might actually make more money when Samsung (or another chip-buying, royalty-paying licensee) sells a phone than when it does the same.
Best Regards,
Gregg |
