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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Ramsey Su who wrote (22373)5/8/2002 7:24:53 PM
From: Ramsey Su  Respond to of 196977
 
motorola.com.cn

I had the opportunity to look at one of these over the weekend. It is a MOT GPRS handset for China Mobile.

Judging from its appearance, it is a very sellable device. The person who showed it to me claims they are getting 40kpbs right now.



To: Ramsey Su who wrote (22373)5/9/2002 12:53:49 PM
From: David E. Taylor  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 196977
 
Ramsey:

Thanks for reminding me of that GSM patent paper you linked, I have it "filed" but had forgotten about it.

Lots of interesting background and discussion in it on how the Euros managed to keep non-Euros (except Motorola) out of the GSM licensing stream cash flow cow, but this is the one bit I was reminded of (page 12):

...Our own research has indicated that the cumulative fee paid for GSM handset license is very high, and this was recently confirmed by the act[ing] director of ETNO [European public Telecommunications Network Operators' association], who revealed that royalty fees make up to 29% of the costs of a GSM handset. Such prices make competing very difficult for those companies that are not participating in the cross-license fees...

Maybe people (like Nokia) who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones....

I also recall there were some posts of articles around this time last year (that I haven't tried to dig up, maybe someone with a decent indexing system to historical posts could find them) discussing the fact that total license fees for WCDMA handsets could be as high as around 35% when they're all added up.

In comparison, Qualcomm's 4.5% or so on handsets is a miserly royalty rate, and the Koreans and other CDMA handset manufacturers should be thankful for that.

And as for NOK owning 25% of the "essential" IPR for WCDMA, much of the IPR they do own apparently has little to do with the QCOM patents essential to CDMA/WCDMA, as this table shows:

Table 1 - Subsequent Art Citation Frequency for Select Companies for Five Early Qualcomm Patents

Number of Patents
Qualcomm
Patent ERICY Omnipoint NOK InterDigital MOT QCOM

4,901,307 17 56 5 36 24 80
5,103,459 10 46 9 33 36 72
5,101,501 8 51 5 28 38 62
5,109,390 10 53 10 32 41 44
5,056,109 31 50 6 30 25 59

Total 76 256 35 159 164 317


From:

m-cam.com

David T.



To: Ramsey Su who wrote (22373)5/9/2002 5:54:02 PM
From: propitious7  Respond to of 196977
 
NOK - why 5% roy cap initiative?
ramsey
i second david t's thanks and plaudits on your index system to link us back to that excellent paper by the three dutchmen on IPR pooling in GSM development. i had read it; lost it; and now have it again. very important article to understand the game strategy of carriers- producers - govts in 3G, and it bears on the NOK 5% ploy.

IN GSM development the six firms with essential IPR for GSM (ERICY, NOK, MOT, Siemens, Alcatel and Philips) essentially formed a patent pool, though it was done by separate cross-licenses, exchanging IPR rights for (presumably) low or no royalties and access to after-acquired IPR within the subject field. That left second tier players, the Japanese and latecomers (Koreans and others), to negotiate with multiple parties at cumulative royalties not broadly known but stated in this article to have been 29% in at least one case.The ETSI ( EU competition bureau must have been comatose at the time) allowed the major IPR holders to avoid a compulsory licensing regime by accepting their "musketeer's oath" to deal with any prospective licenses and to offer a license on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory basis (at least for production in Europe). The article says that only in the "late 90's" have certain Japanese producers been able to collect the full deck of licenses to produce GSM handsets (are Koreans in this group too?).

CLEARLY the Asian countries were not about to repeat that experience with 3G, where they adopted the Euro standard and then were locked in to buying Euro (and MOT) equipment for a decade. (i) The Japanese backed away from the Euro scramble to embed proprietary technology into the 3G standards and NTT DoCoMo went its own way on wCDMA; (ii) the Chinese took ten years off the life of IJ as the Govt directly hammered out the framework for IPR license from QCOM as condition to cdma entry to China; (iii) Surely -- but has anyone heard direct reports -- there have been heavy talks and meetings in which Korean govt and China govt have made it clear that licensing of Euro (and Japanese) IPRs for wCDMA (UMTS) must be in hand and provide an acceptable basis for manufacture by their own national producers for domestic and export before wCDMA (UMTS) contracts will be committed.

My inference about the NOK 5% ploy is the following. (i) NOK would like to stir up a crowd to start muttering and then shouting that wCDMA should not be burdened by IPR royalties of >5% cumulative. It doesn't matter that QCOM already has contracts with the relevant licensees; that won't stop the opportunistic governments and producers from starting to yelp for a cumulative cap. It just sounds fair so shout it out.
(ii) NOK is positioning itself that it owns 25% of the essential IPR so it should get 25% of the 5% royalties; sounds fair doesn't it? We are just talking about a publicity campagin now, not a corporate strategy. Just make trouble for QCOM and look like a good guy to the second tier producers and to the carriers.
(iii) the INTERESTING inference I draw is that NOK is getting big pressure from some countries that they are not going to allow contracts to be let or standards to be adopted until the IPR licenses are in hand on terms acceptable to governments and their national producers. Korea, China, India, Russia, Brazil ??? Has nayone heard any reports. If so, then it may be that NOK is admitting that the wCDM group are going to have to take some collective action to accomodate those who were locked out of the GSM party. Obviously NOK doesn't want to do this. Of course, they wd prefer to keep 35% market share. But it may be that to get wCDMA started outside of Euroland, the framework is going to have to be created and agreed to.

Just an overactive mind with (at long last) some idle time. Any thoughts?

propitious



To: Ramsey Su who wrote (22373)5/10/2002 9:13:49 AM
From: JPitcairn  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 196977
 
Great link, Ramsey - thanks for the reminder.

www-edocs.unimaas.nl

Page 12, line 7:
"Our own research has indicated that the cumulative fee paid for GSM handset licenses is very high, and this was recently confirmed by the actor director of the ETNO, who revealed that royalty fees make up to 29% of the costs of GSM handset. Such prices make competing very difficult for those companies that are not participating in the cross-license fees."

How generous of Nokia to suggest a 5% total royalty cost on WCDMA. Bless their hearts. <ggg>

Jeff