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

To: manalagi who wrote (62203)	4/8/2007 5:49:13 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 197016

On the contrary, QUALCOMM has incentive to INCREASE the rate. <“We have no incentive to lower the rate,” said Qualcomm's Lupin. > The free market value of QUALCOMM's patents is a LOT more than 5%. It's at least 30%. But because of legacy licences, for which only 5% and even less were agreed while QUALCOMM was over a barrel, newcomers can't afford to pay more because competitors paying lower prices would eat their lunch. Nokia, being the biggest behemoth, could pay more and still compete because their margins are high, their market share huge and economies of scale enormous. In the interests of fairness for other licensees, QUALCOMM should charge Nokia a huge upfront fee, to cover all the legal expenses for a start, but also to force Nokia to increase their prices to amortize that cost and enable competitors to have a fair go at selling their cyberphones. That would be reasonable. GSM royalties have been huge so it would be reasonable to charge at least the same. W-CDMA royalties are about 12% so CDMA2000 royalties should match that to give W-CDMA a fair go and in recognition that if we count patents, there are fewer patents from QUALCOMM used in W-CDMA than in CDMA2000 and as Nokia says, QUALCOMM royalties for W-CDMA should be less than for CDMA2000 if counting royalties is a good way of calculating what the royalty should be. So come on QUALCOMM, be FRANDly and increase Nokia's royalty to 12%, and charge a $2bn upfront licensing fee to cover all the costs and to be proportionate with other upfront licences for smaller cyberphone makers. I really think the upfront fee should be $10bn to include some amount for pain and suffering. QCOM dropped from $53 to $36 while the markets were bounding, because of the legal attacks from slimy hagfish. That's about $20bn, which is a LOT of pain and suffering. Though it did give QCOM a chance to buy some stock back at a more reasonable price, so we should discount that. $10bn would be a FRANDly upfront fee. But make it $2bn to be generous if NOK will agree to the 12% royalty. Otherwise, Nokia can go back to gumboots and perhaps get into hagfish fishing [there are a lot around in their neck of the woods]. Apparently Koreans quite like hagfish: Message 23436470 12% royalty tomorrow. State it officially in a press release. Or Nokia can go back to making gumboots. Any lower price offered was just for negotiations leading up to the relicensing date. Unfortunately, Nokia can avoid that high fee by merely renewing the existing agreement, which was their default position in negotiations. They had hoped to trick QUALCOMM into panicking and being bewildered by litigation and lowering royalties. Now it's Nokia which has to panic. If they accidentally abrogate the existing agreement, they will be facing 12% royalties. Minimum!! Their easy way out is clear. Renew tomorrow but preferably today. Meanwhile, QUALCOMM should phone Nancy Pelosi and The White House and get bipartisan support for an urgent and immediate ban on Nokia supplying the USA with weapons of mass economic destruction of USA workers and government revenues. It's something they could both agree on which would be nice for them and the USA. As King George II says, you're either with us or against us. Raiding Uncle Sam's coffers looks like "against us". Mqurice PS: Re the $20 million, it seems that Nokia left off a couple of zeroes for the upfront fee. BTW, hagfish skin gumboots would be very nice for winter wear in city environments, but not tough enough for farm work. Lined with NZ alpaca wool, mixed with merino wool, they would be fantastic in the harsh Finland winters. Come to think of it, they would be pretty good in the cool NZ winters too. I would like some slippers with a Nokia share certificate pattern on the soles.