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

To: slacker711 who wrote (32686)	2/20/2003 10:39:50 AM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 197227

Very interesting comments from Jeffrey Belk about W-CDMA economies of scale.... telecoms.com More chips, more choice 20-February-2003 Qualcomm is back in Cannes-and it's most definitely in the UMTS business. Last year says Jeff Belk, senior director of marketing, a test handset was being used on the show floor. This year there are "buttoned-up UMTS handsets" with Qualcomm chips, on show from Samsung, Sanyo and LG. The company is now on the hunt for more customers - not only the big names, but also niche vendors and "the IT computing device side would make an interesting customer base". Why is this? Put simply, segmentation. Qualcomm, like a lot of industry names, sees the next phase of service development as being operator-led. "We think that fundamentally, globally the operator model is changing. From voice-centric types of devices, once you go to service platforms and a broad range of devices, segmentation strategy is key. And if you're an operator needing to create a segmentation strategy you need to specify what types of products and services you want to target for what segment" -; Vodafone Live! and a similar Verizon strategy are early examples, he says. Once you do that, you provide an opportunity for smaller vendors to target niches that wouldn't have been possible in the more monolithic 2G CDMA/GSM environment. Qualcomm's Launchpad suite of advanced capabilities is, he says, the manifestation of this -; focused on delivering products and services on devices and in a manner that meets the needs of the consumer. "There has to be a brutal focus on the consumer -; because without it the operators are not going to monetise as quickly as they want; if they're passive and not really understanding their customer and how to squeeze an extra Euro of ARPU out of a segment they'll be missing out on revenue opportunity." And he, unsurprisingly, believes this can start at the chipset level -; but he's unsure whether much of it can start with GPRS, arguing that, along with CDMA2000, UMTS will provide the dramatic difference in user experience that 2G CDMA and 2/2.5 G GSM will have difficulty doing. He takes some pleasure from hitting back at the argument that GSM economies of scale would boost UMTS handset production. RF aside, the Samsung UMTS phone is identical to its CDMA2000 counterpart. "It's the economies of scale of the CDMA2000 device that, as the UMTS version comes out, allows them to leverage the volumes of these devices -; so these devices are going to help UMTS prices come down quickly!" However, other CDMA handset vendors such as Kyocera shouldn't worry that the enthusiasm will go any further. Qualcomm may have the most broadly deployed UMTS test handset in Europe right now but "we're not going back in the phone business".