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

To: waitwatchwander who wrote (128858)	5/9/2003 1:19:17 PM
From: kech	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

No question it is fine to fold up QSI now or certainly to reduce investments a lot as Qualcomm is doing. The point I was trying to make though was that it had a place and is more related to some of the successes the company has today than the subscriber count would indicate. There are also some nice historical issues as well in how things like Leap happened. There was a time that they needed an infrastructure division in order to have CDMA infrastructure equipment available for prospective CDMA adapters. Decisions like Leap were made in part because there was a lot of hope for the business plan of "all you can eat" cellular, but also because it was a way for the infrastructure business to sell some equipment. Pegaso and Smartcom and Vesper also were ways to support the infrastructure business. Just because infrastructure and handsets could be sold off eventually doesn't necessarily mean that they were never important in getting CDMA going. I think these were very important parts of Qualcomm's CDMA deployment strategy and the decision to exit infra and handsets was also very timely. By the way, there was this guy at Sprint named Schmidt who wanted to get them to use GSM instead of CDMA. All he kept saying was that he had been burned starting a new provider someplace and there weren't enough handsets (either GSM or TDMA) to get the launch done on time. He kept saying "never again" as a way of saying don't do CDMA - there won't be handsets available that work or will be low cost. Fortunately this didn't stop Sprint, but it was important at that time that Qualcomm take the risk to make their own handsets and get the market going.