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


To: Jeff Vayda who wrote (61227)3/21/2007 4:10:09 PM
From: waitwatchwander  Respond to of 196977
 
You make a good point about the power of scale and network design. I think a counter side to that comes out of the nature of backward compatibility within cdma handset technology. I wasn't thinking about the building of a complete wireless system based solely upon pre'99 technology. My thinking was more down the line of cherry picking the low hanging fruit within the UTMS handset arena such as TI, Nokia and Motorola are doing with LoCosto and eCosto(?).

Playing with numbers is an Eric game. I guess that is why my post attracted his attention.

Wrt my numbers, I didn't start at that point. My thoughts came about from a process of trying to simplify the issues around handset royalty setting and quantifying the simplified parts consistent with the perspective of today. Many just came out of my head as reasonable guestimates confined within the constraints of an overall cap of 5% royalties. I have never bought into royalty levels for any industry enabling technology (ie DVD, Rambus, mp3, MPEG, etc) being above that figure in totality. The GSM numbers folks throw around are just idiotic.

I see the key numeric here, dollar weighted market share for legacy vs HDR technology. Here I started low, assuming operators would finally be interested in promoted new, efficient technology. I then worked backward into the GSM Associations current subscriber numbers. Thoughts behind dollar weighted handset costs got washed out during that process. Raw GSMA subscriber numbers are here:

gsmworld.com
(see Number of Connections by Bearer Technology - Bottom Table)

If you go back to my original post you will discover some of the variants I considered in this area. The 15% growth number also came out of my head. As I mentioned before, I started the post only to determine the bounds of the key royalty setting components and a back of the envelope blending of those factors.

Whatever standard royalty comes out of current negotiations - cdma technology factors are going to start out being weighed towards Qualcomm and move towards others; market share components are going to start out being weighed towards non-cdma voice and move towards cdma data; and most importantly, Qualcomm's proportional cut of the pie is not going to rise. Not prompting the later item is only demonstrating a characteristic that is guaranteed to raise the anit-competitive eery of ALL international trade commissions. Another idiotic idea that seems to gather folks.

What's your opinion of my basic components and the numbers I have assigned? If you care to provide some bands for the identified components, I'll throw it all into an excel spreadsheet, get Eric to provide his numerical take and do some sensitivity analysis.

Your interest is appreciated and I agree with all your 'pay for one, pay for all' comments.

Trevor