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To: TobagoJack who wrote (8096)	9/2/2001 10:00:23 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

Jay, thanks for the warning re the house. But worry not. I have been waiting for this crunch since long before all the Johny-come-latelies on this thread. I have been lying in wait for it since 1996. Lying in wait, [CB, please don't get excited and misunderstand that to mean I am a liar], isn't quite as simple as it sounds, as there are no hills to hide in, so one has to hide right there on the battlefield, with flak jacket open, barechested, challenging the horde, albeit as a pixelated hologram. In fact, I keep my flak jacket zipped up, camouflage on and I like to be in a foxhole. It's only my hologram doing a Terminator pose. We have a house without mortgagee interest and a little stash of cash for a rainy day in local money and have been in that position since mid 1999, so I am not wildly foolhardy. So to the main battlefield where the big drama and highly profitable [or loss making] philanthropic investment takes place. CDMA is not in trouble, especially as related to QUALCOMM. Certainly, the downstream businesses are fighting for market share, with declining phone ASPs, subscribers using fewer MOU each and paying less for them. That's not so good for the intermediaries but good for QUALCOMM and the subscribers. Q! sells their high margin ASICs and gets handset royalties. Subscribers get a real deal. The intermediaries get to work hard to keep their business and a job. But more importantly, <Fewer than one in ten of the 1.25 billion Chinese has a mobile phone, compared with four out of ten Americans and five out of ten Europeans.> My argument for years has been that there are basic human needs. One of those is communication. That's why I argue that QUALCOMM is very resistant to economic mayhem. People will buy phones before nearly everything else. They might not use them a lot due to high minute charges, but they will have a phone. Even though China is supposed to be impoverished, rich Americans have only four times as many mobile phones per capita. That is proof of the desire for communication. Americans would have more mobile phones except for the fact that there are phones everywhere they go. Of course it's the profitability of a network which drives expansion, so if subscribers aren't paying enough money, the expansions will be slower. But competition is cruel. The network which isn't expanded will not be long for this world. So network operators will have to expand their networks even though they moan about wafer-thin margins and low profits. Any profit is a good profit in the current financial environment, so they better keep going. Happy as a sandboy over CDMA's prospects in China; not too worried about the rest of the world either because everyone wants to communicate. CDMA is the foxhole for me. Mqurice