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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: masa who wrote (6769)	8/4/2004 6:26:23 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 12247

Masa, given the trends in cyberphones, QUALCOMM's market share of ASICs is going to be a LOT more than 25%. Cyberphones are all going to CDMA. Flarion's OFDM won't be taking over any time soon for the voice component in wide area networks though they seem to have a competitive product for data services and I don't see why they shouldn't be able to do voice, especially if they buy QUALCOMM's power control and other trick patents. GSM and GPRS are really not much use for data. GPRS filled a gap while the serious stuff was rolled out. GSM is good for text messaging, but not megabytes of data moving quickly and cheaply to cyberphones. GPRS isn't any good either because there isn't enough capacity in GSM networks. To get an accurate idea of QUALCOMM's market position, you should think in terms of 3G ASICs, not mobile phones and bear in mind that everyone is moving to 3G networks. I don't think QUALCOMM has much of a position at all in OFDM. Several years ago, I visited Auckland University and found there was a group there working on OFDM. My competitive threat antennae started twitching like crazy. We had discussion about this in SI. At an AGM we had somebody ask Andrew Viterbi about OFDM after the meeting [on a one to one basis]. He said that QUALCOMM had a few patents in the area, but seemed to me to be very offhand and non-committal and not wanting to say much, which struck me as odd. A year or maybe it was two later, he left QUALCOMM and took up with Lucent/Flarion which was sorting out OFDM. I suppose he had been keen on OFDM in QUALCOMM but for some reason, QUALCOMM wasn't so keen as he was and I suppose that means Irwin Jacobs. Having worked together for decades, it was quite a shift in the mobile world's centre of gravity to have Irwin and Andrew part company. That meant something. What it meant was that Flarion and OFDM were getting some serious backing and they seem to come up with the goods to enable mobile cyberspace in the data realm at least. Andrew Viterbi had also been very keen on HDR CDMA [high data rate] which became 1xEV-DO [meaning 1 x 1.25 MHz channel evolution, data optimized]. Being data optimized means more spectral efficiency and no latency problems; I think I have that right]. He was a strong proponent for separating voice and data and reading between the lines, I think he and Irwin had different opinions of the merits of mixed voice and data in the same channels. So, 6 years later, OFDM is starting to look as though it'll be a real product with actual customers from next year. It remains to be seen just how much more efficient OFDM is compared with CDMA. CDMA is hugely [orders of magnitude] more efficient than GSM, but even so, it has taken over a decade for CDMA to start to look like a serious competitor to GSM and it's only the advent of mobile cyberspace data and the demands on bandwidth and speed and cost which has propelled CDMA's universal adoption for that service. Since it was that difficult for dramatically better CDMA to overcome GSM, I don't think OFDM will very rapidly displace a great deal of CDMA. In the overall mobile phone business, QUALCOMM's chip share is Applish. But what's coming with 3G is where the fun is. QUALCOMM is dominant there and all mobile CDMA will involve significant royalties to QUALCOMM, so it's not really the same as Apple. This is indeed a place where you can expound on any wacky and wild ideas you might have. Feel free to lay it all on the line. Mqurice

To: masa who wrote (6769)	8/4/2004 2:14:40 PM
From: John Hayman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12247

masa, The reason you caught flak on the other thread is because you appear to be yet another person with knowledge in the field but not laying all of your cards on the table. We have seen this before. You need to explain yourself a tad more. These threads are made up of investors, but also a lot of telecommunications geeks. You really can't get away with too much without a debate. Plus, what are your motivations? As an investment? The "other board" has had experience with someone coming on the thread and making statements against qualcomm/cdma. There has been a few "qualcomm bashers" that had some alternative motives. For instance one was being paid by a European company as a consultant. Others? Well, some we never knew their motives, but I really didn't get the impression that it was an investment motive . Most of them were quite knowledgeable in the telecommunications field, but they ended up being wrong about qualcomm. Well, they are all gone now.....or maybe not!!! This has been happening here for many years on SI, but I saw it happening a lot earlier on other message board services too. Actually back in the early 90's qualcomm was a very heated topic, even before the World Wide Web. You have to realize that some of the people here on the qualcomm boards are rather smart folks. Some work in the field, some even at qualcomm at one time, and a few folks with a grasp of the technology. It's ok to be against qualcomm, but you need to state your reasons why. Talk with Maurice here, he has an understanding of all this and can definitely say it better than I can. Go Q! John PS.......welcome to SI.

To: masa who wrote (6769)	8/4/2004 4:05:47 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12247

Hi again Masa. BTW, did you see that Texas Instruments is only a $35bn market capitalization companyhttp://www.siliconinvestor.com/research/quote.gsp?s=TXN . Nokia is only a $56bn company. QUALCOMM is now a $57bn company. So, Texas Instruments might be bigger in GSM, but that's not much use when CDMA is where the action is. That's why Texas has been struggling to get into CDMA and agreed an intellectual property trade with QUALCOMM. <Qualcomm is about 25% of the mobile phone chipset business, almost like Apple in computers (e.g. TI is 3 times bigger, but not making so much noise about it). For some reason (well, I think I know why) they get all the attention. Well, maybe they have the best sales people, or maybe they are just better lyiers... > What's your first language? I think you meant liars, but maybe lyieration is some CDMA encoding technique I don't know about. Meanwhile, have a look at some more market capitalisations: Message 20351829 QUALCOMM is way up there with the big beasts now. It's nearly time for some anti-trust anti-monopoly pro-competition envy government bossy-britches confiscation and rule-making. Not yet, but when QUALCOMM is the world's first $1 trillion company and everyone is dependent on QUALCOMM technology, there'll be some political pressure to take their money and break them up and do something nasty. The lawyerly types say no, because QUALCOMM is not tying and all that stuff. But I remain unconvinced. Mqurice

To: masa who wrote (6769)	8/9/2004 10:08:18 PM
From: pheilman_	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12247

re: Qualcomm is about 25% of the mobile phone chipset business, almost like Apple in computers Apple's market share at 3.7 percent Friday, July 16, 2004 @ 1:45pm Apple was the No. 5 PC vendor in the US market in the second quarter with a 3.7% market share behind Dell (32.9%), HP (19.3%), Gateway (5.6%), and IBM (5.6%). IDC research said that Apple sold 495,00 Macs, representing a growth of 9.3% from the same quarter in 2003. Shipments include those to distribution channels or end users. Gateway showed the strongest growth of nearly 60% in the US market, shipping more than 750,000 units. Overall, the US market grew 10.9%; however Apple was not among the 5 vendors in worldwide shipments. As noted earlier, that market grew by 15.5% with strong demand in Europe as well as better than expected results in Canada and Latin America. Masa, that was the very first response from google. So, you are off by a factor of 7 on a very, very simple number to verify. Your assumptions are wrong therefore your conclusions are meaningless.