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

To: Valueman who wrote (8716)	2/20/1998 5:28:00 PM
From: Ramsey Su	Respond to of 152472

Tom, I am pretty sure, though I cannot reference the article, that Toyota had major plans to expand into telecom. It was not a QCOM related article and I did not remember reading anything that would be directly in CDMA or wireless vs generic telecom. It would be good news if it is indeed Toyota with emphaisis on the QCOM stuff. Then again, Toyota is one smart company and they certainly know who has the best technology. Ramsey

To: Valueman who wrote (8716)	2/20/1998 5:47:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Toyota a good guess, but how about Hyundai? Of Globalstar fame. But I suppose they are small in the car stakes. Toyota would be a good one for access into Japan and I half think of them as already having some telecoms business. They've been over in Korea and no doubt Japan at top managment level - as mentioned at the AGM. Caxton, I don't accept that some cancelled orders from Korea was a bombshell. Although investors reacted that way. On slow Q-phone sales and laying off temporary staff, I thought they've moved production into Qualcomm Personal Electronics instead of Qualcomm. As they explained at the AGM, temporary staff are a fact of life. In any industry. There are always ups and downs even on a long term extremely rapid growth path. But draw 10 year graphs of permanent and temporary staff and see what they look like. I was going to buy a Q-phone at AirTouch in Oceanside, but since they don't sell them, and Sprint has limited coverage still, and a dual mode phone is better at present, and it is expensive, with limited talk time compared with the 820 which I bought and now use in New Zealand on analogue [NZ speling - {USA speling}]. So I'm not surprised Q-Phone sales are hard to predict. In such a market as cellphones, any projections are more or less wild guesses. Look at projections for growth rates over the past 10 years - wildly underestimated. I think still wildly underestimated. On chicken counting and saying Europeans will need Qualcomm licences [NZ spelling again], management need to project their best judgement. It seems to be agreed even by their opposition that licenses are going to be needed from Qualcomm. But they prefer not to pay. Management did use wishful thinking in time to market 5 years ago and missed by 2 years. That's history and let's face it, it had to be a guess. 2 years isn't that long anyway, especially since they depended to some extent on others to get to market. On profits. While profits have become a real part of the business now, they are still way to small and growth rates still way to large and money flows too big [vendor financing and development funding needs] for profit to be a significant factor yet. Irwin said as much when he said at the AGM they have no plans for dividends as yet. Maybe that was Harvey said it. The sale of cdmaOne handsets is only entering its first year of seriously available networks in the USA. All the money is needed for development still. Qualcomm is still a little company in market capitalisation. When they = MSFT/Intel/IBM combined, then dividends and profits should be immense. And Qdog can start feeling sorry for $Bill. The case for buying Qcom rests on 2005 profits [to me], not 1999. On Nokia and other competitors, cannibalisation and so on, great. None of the Apple tendencies here. Not only is there cloning, they licensed it and get paid for it. Luckily for Microsoft and IBM there was massive cloning of their products for which they didn't get paid as it gave them enormous market share and now people pay anyway. If Apple had encouraged cloning, they might well be the industry behemoth. It does mean Qualcomm has to perform or close the uncompetitive parts of their business, be they handsets, Eudora, Omnitracs, infrastructure, ASIC sales, joint ventures, software design sales, etc. But that's fine. If they succeed, which they should, yippeee!! No worries! Maurice