Tom, [and co] sorry I'm a slow correspondent lately. I've managed to keep up with reading the proceedings but little else. The Q phone seems to have created quite a stir with Motorola planning on putting the kibosh on it. I'd be surprised if Qualcomm has stepped on their intellectual property rights.
12 March is a traditional day for me, so it wouldn't be complete without writing something on the CDMA site. Since I don't really have much to say about Qualcomm that hasn't been said - well I have some things to say, but they can wait, I thought it might be time to call it a day on this particular thread. It has been going just about a year and some of the questions have been answered.
CDMA in Hong Kong and Korea are going very well. Los Angeles has become irrelevant with massive CDMA introductions everywhere in USA. China seems likely to become the biggest market - Al Gore has maybe suggested that it is a bit presumptuous to tell China how to run themselves and Qualcomm can concentrate on bringing CDMA, Eudora and the Web to China which will do more for personal freedom than all the huffing and puffing and sailing of boats with soldiers on them through the Taiwan straits. The Q phone seems likely to evolve to a web phone integrated with a notebook computer "Anita" though it is early days yet.
Eudora is running away with the email market. Qualcomm has got strategy after strategy after strategy correct. It is looking like a lot more than luck. Ericsson and Motorola could perhaps be taken over by Qualcomm rather than the reverse, which some have suggested.
The stock price has reflected the 1996 activities but is a long way short of recognizing the revenue that is now starting to flood in. I had guessed [thinking it was really a bit optimistic] at $2bn revenue for 1997, but that is looking quite achievable. March quarter coming up and that should see the first of profits exceeding R and D by a big chunk. Vendor financing, capital investment and growth are now the money drains so no dividends for a while yet.
Qualcomm's price is now +100% from the post panic low of $30 a year ago which Ramsey kindly pointed out to me enabling me to pounce on some more shares being abandoned by the Wall Street crowd. Thanks folks!! The markets are at an all time high, but still not up to my official prediction [from about Aug 1994] that the Dow would be at 8000 by Feb 1998. There are so many people frightened of the "absurd" heights of the markets that the cash backup is fairly substantial, so my guess is no serious market crash, though a 20% tidy up of gamblers is always on the cards.
I say it is going to keep going up because money will keep being printed by the governments, technology is cutting costs dramatically and there are 6 billion people racing into the future with the obscenities of the 19th and 20th centuries largely behind us.
Has NextWave Telecom bid too much? I still say no, even though it seems that the cost of spectrum owes a lot more to greed and deliberate mismanagement by governments than to laws of physics. NextWave are now heading for a timely IPO - wisely waiting until now rather than go too early last July when the public backing for their concept would have been thin on the ground.
Bill Frezza has totally collapsed, being reduced to counting handsets and trying to guess when CDMA will overtake GSM in subscriber numbers. I think it will be much sooner than I had previously thought. Maybe only 2 more years for worldwide defeat of GSM! CDMA is moving like a comet and a pretty bright one at that. Chicken wire and bubblegum have evidently proven to be eminently suitable materials. Ha, ha, ha to you Bill!!
Globalstar is looking good and Iridium is looking sick. They couldn't even get their rockets off the ground and Motorola is already planning their CDMA satellite system to replace Iridium.
So, I thought I might call it a day on this stream. There are lots of people know a lot about it now - Philip Merryman being a champion information hunter/poster and Chris "Destroyer" Reeder pointing out the technical demerits of Motorola and Ericsson. So I can sit back and relax a lot more.
Maybe I'll start another stream soon, more up to date and complementary to the other discussions. Or maybe I'll just doze off in the sun some more. Thanks to all who contributed so much. It seems to be a very successful way of beating the "experts" this SI discussion. Massive synergy from many thoughtful people with a wide range of expertise. Very dangerous for the Wall Street mavens.
But you asked:
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Maurice - What do you think of the recent sheep cloning experiments by scientists in Britain - the first mammal to be a perfect copy of another mammal? Apparently a sheep egg with nucleus removed was combined with a nucleus from the cell of the same sheeps udder. A perfect clone of the same sheep resulted and it has no grown to adulthood with all the same genetics of its mama/papa. ( I read about it in my morning paper.) What are the possibilities? How will this affect ewe?
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I reckon it is great and all the Luddites who fear the Frankenstein monster can go live in their caves. I'm all for it!! And applied to humans too!! When I figure out how to do it, I'm going to invest in DNA, eugenics and humanoids! AFFX looks like the right sort of company.
Meanwhile, I hope the Q Phone is cloned by the billion!!! Now, if they could just link it directly into our brains so we don't have to have any damn wires and batteries. Ear drums, and ear wax seem a bit archaic as a means of hearing.
Come on in 2Q Qcom results!!!!
Maurice |
