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

To: TShirtPrinter who wrote (103640)	9/3/2001 9:01:19 PM
From: Stock Farmer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Tony: Are you trying to tell me because QCOM makes money on the technology CDMA, the service providers using that see them as competition? No. Not as service competition. No, that is a fact of partnership, as you identified. But I am not talking about the gizmos being exchanged. I am talking more jugular. And more subtle than that. The businesses which are their customers/partners are competing with them for profit share. Which in a commodity business can become fierce. I don't know of many successful commodity businesses that have obscenely profitable intermediaries in the value chain. I don't know of many commodity business that have anyone obscenely profitable anywhere in the value chain. Not for long. And I have personally dealt with carriers as a "partner". I mean negotiated contracts. Not just sat in meetings or provided the stuff that someone else had negotiated. Please let me tell you that if they have any reasonable subscriber base at all then they are ginormous beurocracies where the right hand does not even acknowledge the left exists, let alone know what it's doing or that it could be remotely relevant. It is not infrequent as an outsider to end up as grist between two beurocratic grindstones. No, very few suppliers to this species of mountain troll emerge fat and highly profitable. So you must expect that in every one of Q's customers there will be someone, perhaps several different groups of someones, in whose job it is is to make Q less profitable. Period. Long term. Maybe not today. But sooner, if not already. One rarely has competitors with as effective or as fierce impact on revenues. So yes, Q! is in an aukward position. Of course, this is a systemic perspective. That is, it does not take into account any special circumstances such as why Carriers would be generous to "partner" x and parsimonious to partner y. So I accept that there may be special cases that auger in favor of Q! But I would like to hear what they are. And I doubt the answer is that end customers will be clamoring to get rid of their GSM phones to pick up CDMA phones just because the technology is better. John.