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

To: JGoren who wrote (76293)	4/15/2008 12:49:04 AM
From: peterk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 196986

Jgoren- Just like financial consultants the box makers want a piece of the lucrative patent royalty fee market. Financial consultants would rather be hedge fund money managers because of the higher fees. Neither the box makers nor the consultants are qualified to earn the fees, but that doesn't stop them from trying. Take Nokia for example. Do you know of any licensing contracts Nokia has signed with other vendors? Does Nokia have a similar licensing program like Quals? If so how many companies have signed contracts with Nokia to have access to their IPR. The box makers know the money is made in developing IPR and licensing it. Unfortunately for them they can't make the type of money holders of IPR can make, and that frustrates the hell out of them.

To: JGoren who wrote (76293)	4/15/2008 4:31:32 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 196986

On the contrary, Qualcomm is in a stronger position than with CDMA. Back in 1990, when CDMA was a gleam in an eye and a test network in San Diego, the cellphone market was little. Worldwide, almost nobody had a cellphone. < On the 4G front, however, Qualcomm may not be in the position of leverage that it stood on for 3G. WCDMA was built on the basic radio interface that Qualcomm developed internally 20 years ago. Analysts and vendors alike have said that the patents for OFDMA are much more dispersed than they were in the 3G and 2G standards, implying that no one company can exert enough patent pressure to gum up the works. In addition, critical elements of both the LTE and WiMAX standards use technology developed primarily by other companies. The multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) smart antenna technology used in both WiMAX and LTE is perhaps the best example.> Licensing agreements were signed on the basis of Qualcomm being a cash short start up, albeit with a successful OmniTRACS business funding development. Now, nearly 20 years later, all roads lead to CDMA and 3G. Qualcomm owns enough OFDM technology to do standalone networks. CDMA of all variations is enormous and growing very rapidly. Qualcomm doesn't need OFDM in the same way that Nokia, the market leader, didn't need CDMA and would have been happy if it didn't get anywhere and Nokia continued to rule the world including the USA with GSM. If OFDM never existed, Qualcomm would end up with nearly all the cyberphone business. The mobile market is now measured in $hundreds of billions in annual revenue, and into the $trillions in market capitalisation. If Qualcomm refuses to allow people to use their OFDM technology, then they will continue to boom. Qualcomm can charge a lot more for OFDM than they could for CDMA. On a $ per bit per hertz per second basis, OFDM is much more efficient than CDMA, so royalties should be commensurately larger. Qualcomm should be RAISING royalty rates, NOT lowering them. Mqurice