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Technology Stocks : The New Qualcomm - a S&P500 company -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: moat who wrote (729)	8/10/1999 9:31:00 PM
From: ASB	Respond to of 13582

Patents are usually good for 15 years. ASB

To: moat who wrote (729)	8/11/1999 9:37:00 AM
From: Art Bechhoefer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13582

I believe the key 459 patent runs for at least another five or six years, but there are so many patents granted more recently, covering essential aspects of CDMA, that the only threat to CDMA and QUALCOMM's patent coverage would come from a system yet to be invented. Ownership of intellectual property gives QCOM a great deal of real value that does not appear on its books. You can ascribe patent development costs to the asset value of the patent (as is often done in order to defer year-to-year expenses), but there is no accepted accounting practice that ascribes asset value to patents on the basis of potential earnings increases. It is precisely this hard-to-identify value (which doesn't appear on the balance sheet) which gives the company its intrinsic value. That's why in my view the stock is still a bargain.

To: moat who wrote (729)	8/11/1999 10:47:00 AM
From: quidditch	Respond to of 13582

moat, in addition to Art's reply, Q! stressed on its Q-2 (April) conference call (in the aftermath of the ERICY deal--lots of patent and IPR discussion) that if you license one Q! patent its the equivalent, from a royalty to Q! perspective, as licensing them all. Q!uite a revelation. The upshot appears to be that even if essential CDMA patents expire, one or more of Q!'s boatload of subsequent patents will be required for operation of a CDMA system/handset. Regards. Steven