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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Caxton Rhodes who wrote (8464)	2/12/1998 1:19:00 PM
From: brian h	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Caxton and all, From Lehman Brother, lehman.com Brian H.

To: Caxton Rhodes who wrote (8464)	2/12/1998 1:37:00 PM
From: JMD	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Caxton, Ramsey, Harvey, Diamond H, Gregg and all--Holy Erlangs gang, sounds like we've got our thread back. With all this information coming in, it does make me pine for the good old days of 72 hours or so ago. Thank you all for some good stuff. Caxton, the RS&Co. rundown was incredibly bullish. Open Standard CDMA? Makes Surfer Mike's heart go pitty pat so long as the Q gets a little nick on that open standard! Gregg, have heard over and over again that the Q has a poison pill defense whereby all its IPRs go "poof" if bad old LU, e.g., buys us out for a couple of billion (I'm thinking 6 to 7 ). I have never heard of such a thing and am very skeptical. Did I miss something in the 10Q? Thanks for your post: this ongoing discussion of the Q phone's price/market acceptance, failure, winner, good if price goes down cuz we sell more, bad cuz we overshot the market, no we make it up on ASICs anyway, is just a wee bit more than I can digest at this juncture, but keep it up. Finally, it sure is fun to get you guys up in the morning by tossing in a little rant from the Motley thread. Guess Sidman or whoever was at the Ericy meeting! Regards, Mike Doyle

To: Caxton Rhodes who wrote (8464)	2/12/1998 4:53:00 PM
From: John Cuthbertson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Caxton, I was at the analysts meeting yesterday, and in fact I sat next to the fellow from Robertson Stephens. (Fellow threaders Harvey Rosenkrantz and Eric Daniels were also there -- hi guys). I thought I would post some of my observations from the meeting, since some are a bit different from what was in the RS&Co. report you posted, and also to elaborate a bit on Harvey's post #8441. As stated by Dr. Jacobs, it is Qualcomm's opinion that ETSI's W-CDMA cannot be implemented without using Qualcomm's intellectual property. Further, QCOM has not agreed to license its patented technology for use with W-CDMA, and is "evaluating" whether it would do so. Clearly, Dr. Jacobs felt that QCOM was in a position of strength in negotiating with the Europeans, and intends to use that position to try to influence the EU. They would like for the EU not to approve a "European" standard, but rather to agree with the rest of the world on a global standard. Qualcomm has its own ideas about what such a standard should be like, with one important characteristic being the existence of an "evolutionary" change path for all operators of current digital systems (i.e. cdmaOne as well as GSM). QCOM also wants to use its negotiating position to get the EU to allow cdmaOne to be used in ETSI countries, where it's not now allowed. It definitely seemed that QCOM's management felt that they were in the driver's seat with respect to negotiations with the EU regarding W-CDMA, and that if QCOM did not allow the use of its intellectual property rights, "they have to get another system," as Dr. J. said. At the same time, Dr. Jacobs was aware of the argument that QCOM should not overplay its hand and attempt to stymie development of 3rd generation systems. He said something like: "You could say that you don't want to end up like Ericsson, that Ericsson tried to block development of CDMA and couldn't. (But then, Ericsson didn't have the IPR's to block it.) We're not trying to block things." QCOM management also said they have not decided whether QCOM would be a manufacturer of ETSI W-CDMA equipment if the standard comes into use, saying it is not clear when such a market would develop. They pointed out that the company's current licenses are for IS-95 applications, and could not be used for W-CDMA. In the meantime, Qualcomm is proceeding to work on development of a wideband version of cdmaOne, IS-95HDR (High Data Rate), which should be ready in 1999 (I think). This would offer data rates up to 1.25Mbps on an IS-95 channel, or 2.5Mbps using two channels. This is what QCOM would like to present to ITU as a candidate for a world 3rd generation digital standard. One more thing from the meeting. The management mentioned that the statement in their earnings warning that Q2 profits would be "closer to Q2 97 than Q1 98" was meant to be "directional" in nature rather than absolute, and they weren't sure people were taking it the right way. My interpretation of this (not the only possible one): Q2 profits will be lower, but $.23 is too low. Sorry for the length, hope this is useful to people. ==John