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

To: waitwatchwander who wrote (61466)	3/25/2007 1:58:56 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 197240

Trev, things are always different. The value of patents [and other things] is what the market will bear. That changes constantly. < Nokia is right that the situation is now different but that doesn't necessarily translate into Nokia being right about the value of either parties current IP.> Nokia is thinking in terms of Kremlin Central Planning type pricing where some committee decides the official value of something. When they first got a licence, QUALCOMM was over a barrel with an unproven technology with competitors well ahead and mobile cyberspace barely thought of, though QUALCOMM had the prescience to include the internet protocol in the "stack". Since then and every day since then, the value of intellectual property has changed. So, even if nearly all of QUALCOMM's patents had expired, because of colossal market demand, the remaining prosaic patents might be worth a lot more than the whole expired menagerie of patents which breached the laws of physics and reinvented reality back in the day. Given the demand for spectrum and mobile cyberspace, I get the impression that QUALCOMM's intellectual property is grossly under-priced, not over-priced. If it's too expensive, competing technology would be on the rampage, with subscribers crowding in. GSM is continuing to gain ground against CDMA, but that's because of legacy issues such as network effect from a closed shop in Europe, SIMs, roaming, economies of scale making GSM networks and handsets cheaper even if less efficient on spectrum, and because of upgrades to GPRS and EDGE which allegedly were based on intellectual property pinched from QUALCOMM [which I am not depending on - if that was true, I don't believe QUALCOMM would have allowed the situation to go on so long]. In New Zealand, Japan, USA and elsewhere where there is actual competition, CDMA in various forms is now swarming all over GSM/TDMA/PHS/etc. There are still some swindles, such as in India and China, where political influence supports GSM. QCOM royalties should be going UP as patents expire, not down. Not because patents are expiring, but because the value of remaining and new patents [like EV-DO/HSDPA] is going up. As you said. Mqurice