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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ruffian who wrote (35361)	7/17/1999 9:16:00 AM
From: CDMQ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

I'm sure this invasion of the tasseled lofered crowd will please the qdog! Motorola has plans for S.D. operation Design center here could give rivals wake-up call By Bruce V. Bigelow STAFF WRITER July 17, 1999 Motorola will establish a digital wireless engineering design center in San Diego, already home to Qualcomm and other fierce rivals in the telecommunications industry. A Motorola spokeswoman, Jennifer Weyrauch, provided few details beyond a three-paragraph announcement issued yesterday by Motorola's personal communications sector. Weyrauch said Motorola plans to open its new San Diego design center by September. But she could not say how big the company's facility would be or how many employees would be hired. A statement issued by Paul Fowler, chief operating officer of Motorola's personal communications sector, said the new San Diego design center is the second to be established by Motorola in the past year. In December, Motorola opened a digital wireless design center in Piscataway, N.J., following the purchase of Lucent Technologies' cellular phone research division. Motorola said engineers at the facility, which Lucent had planned to close, would help the company develop new digital phones more quickly. Motorola retained about 300 of the more than 500 Lucent employees in Piscataway, but Weyrauch could not say if Motorola's San Diego operation would be comparable in size. At the time, a Wall Street analyst estimated Motorola acquired the Piscataway unit for less than $100 million. Industry analysts saw the purchase as part of Motorola's "catch-up" strategy, moving from analog to digital-based cellular technology. Motorola has been losing share in the global cellular phone market to Nokia, Ericsson and Qualcomm. The move by the Schaumburg, Ill., Goliath, which currently has no facilities in San Diego, was welcomed by Julie Meier Wright, president of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp. "If I were Motorola I could certainly understand their desire or need to be in this region," she said, citing the decision as further evidence that "San Diego has solidified its position as the wireless capital of the world." The cheering may be muted, however, in Qualcomm's executive offices on Sorrento Mesa. Motorola plans to launch a recruiting campaign Monday to fill a variety of engineering and management jobs, including call-processing software engineers, CDMA/TDMA (code division multiple access/time division multiple access) managers and other hard-to-fill telecom positions. In a newspaper ad about to be published, Motorola boasts of its prowess in advanced cellular phone concepts, and notes, "We're even inventing the audio technology that can turn a cell phone into a MP3 music player." Apart from concerns over work force shortages in key engineering categories, Qualcomm executives also may begin fretting over problems associated with "job hopping" among key engineers and software developers. The problem is much-lamented among Silicon Valley CEOs. Motorola's arrival could also pose thorny problems for the executives who oversee intellectual property issues at Qualcomm and elsewhere. In 1997, Motorola saw striking similarities between its popular palm-sized StarTac phones and Qualcomm's "Q" phone, and its patent-infringement suit against Qualcomm is still pending. Qualcomm executives familiar with the company's recruiting and intellectual property issues could not be reached for comment. Qualcomm spokeswoman Christine Trimble did not return calls to her office yesterday.