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

To: w2j2 who wrote (14113)	8/25/1998 1:33:00 PM
From: Jeff Vayda	Respond to of 152472

Walter: Thanks for a real heavy weight article. It will take a few readings to get it all in. Jeff Vayda

To: w2j2 who wrote (14113)	8/25/1998 4:54:00 PM
From: JMD	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Walter, thanks for RCM article. Scanned it quickly, and then saved to disk to read later. Looks terrific, but does this mean it's okay to buy YHOO? :-) Mike Doyle

To: w2j2 who wrote (14113)	8/25/1998 8:30:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 152472

Thanks Walter, that's what some of us have been saying about Qualcomm for 2 and a half years now - profits, earnings and the like are irrelevant. Q.com has huge investment needs so there's no need to care about earnings until the investment opportunities are all taken and the spare moolah is rolling over the gunwhales. Nearly all Qualcomm commentary is about earnings still. As they said, investors don't care about volatility, white noise, roller coasters. Traders do. Qualcomm is maintaining heavy investment and wisely separating off SpinCo which never fitted with my investment ambitions although SpinCo investmest was perhaps necessary to ensure cdma was developed commercially. A bit like handsets - if Q hadn't made them, cdmaOne markets would have been delayed years. The example they used in part three of two companies, one with higher R&D, used 1 year as the payback time. Of course, Qualcomm's R&D has been a LOT longer. You could say that it has been going for many decades. Andrew Viterbi, Irwin, Klein and co were doing R&D in universities in the 1960s and 70s. They acquired that value and stored it in their heads as understanding. They formed Qualcomm in 1986 and started more direct R&D in cdma, developing many patents over the next 6 years, which now straddle the whole concept of direct spread spectrum cdma. Even at a high rate of compounding or discounting or whatever the jargon is, those R&D dollars are starting to exponentially gain value and were dollars extremely well spent. R&D, personal values and really fuzzy stuff like that is where the real value is derived. It shows nowhere in GAAP. Qualcomm is mindful of Wall Street and investor attitudes, so has ensured fairly steady growth in profits, albeit tiny compared with revenues and the value of the company. But they have very heavily spent on R&D where they know the main effort must go. A shame they couldn't R&D some plastic housings, belt clips and connectors into good functional condition. They'd better R&D Eudora into Japanese too - Outlook Express works in Japanese. Eudora doesn't. There is a LOT of R&D needed to stay with the play. Resting on 1992 patents won't do it given the commitment to the broad development and marketing strategy The Q adopted. Mqurice 6 days to go - I guess the market isn't going to turn quickly enough, but I'm hopeful. Alan Green$pan must be printing like mad right now.