Business Week's article "Philips-Lu cell phone venture falls short of promise" is interesting.. It points up once again the complexity of this technology, and the difficulty of building products based on it. Neither TDMA nor CDMA are mentioned specifically.PH/LU has failed to deliver product to AT&T, and have no CDMA product at mkt. So both Ph/Lu and Mot, enormous companies with heaps of experience, have had a very hard time making this digital transition.Only Nokia has managed to come up with a CDMA phone in a timely fashion with Q IPR, albeit without Q ASICS, and even they've had software problems. It therefore seems fair to conclude that A)Q IPR is not too expensive B) Q ASICS represent tremendous value added C) Criticism of Q manufacturing problems is overblown D)It will not be easy for ERICY to circumvent Q IPR
I've been wondering why Gregg thinks Q might be a target for LU. Maybe the answer is that Q's maligned phone manufacturing operation is much more valuable than people realize. Fortunes' Summer 98 Product Review (p.160) lists three cell phones "to watch". ERICY K Series, Dual Mode Q, Sprint PCS Sony. 2 out of 3 ain' bad.
Qualcomm/Sony has become the 5th largest maker of cell phones in the world:Mot 22%,Nokia 21%,ERICY 16%, Panasonic 7%, Qualcomm 5%,NEC 4%, Siemens 4%, Alcatel 3%, Mitsubishi 2%, PH/LU 2%. These numbers look great when one considers IS95 networks have just gotten up and running, and that Q's share of the mkt will in reality be much larger than is represented by the number of phones that they themselves are making.
BTW...Short interest according to Daily Graphs as of 7/17 was 10.5 million shares, 12.9 days of avg vol, 1/5 of the float....
dave |
