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

To: Ruffian who wrote (19726)	12/14/1998 4:39:00 PM
From: Sawtooth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Thanks for posting the article, Michael. Doesn't Tero realize, we all just want to be friends??? ; )

To: Ruffian who wrote (19726)	12/14/1998 5:57:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Another good effort by Tero. But he gets a few things wrong. There is still huge profit to be made in cellphones. The question is who will make it? The same as Dell was hugely profitable through the 90s despite Tero saying that PCs were not the place to invest. Sure, Nokia did extremely well too, but Dell, in a mature market, did massively well! Cellphones have barely got going. As he says, 200% market penetration for cellular products is likely. I'd say more than that. So far in the world there are only a few hundred million people with crusty old handsets which have no image capability let alone vegemite dispensing and all the other accoutrements of a real communications gadget. Think of a piece of flint used to cut animal hide and compare it with a Swiss Army pocket knife. The fun has begun. Mqurice Tero said: ---------------------------------------------------------------- I would argue that for people wanting to make huge financial killings the future is now somewhere very few of us realize. Just like back in 1990 everybody thought that the PC industry was the best place to invest in and mobile phones were seen as yuppie oddities. For people willing to accept 30-50% annual returns Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola are intriguing possibilities. For people wanting much, much more, the mobile phone industry is yesterday's news. You missed the gold rush by a decade. So did I, but I'm not whining. I'm no conquistador and for me, a fair likelihood of 40% annual returns during next 3-5 years are plenty enough. If you need more excitement than that, perhaps the stock market is not the right place to look. ------------------------------------------------------------------- PS: Here is an interesting item. People in SI being sued for defamation. Message 6781896 Subject 24219 So when we accuse L M Ericsson of being like hagfish, paying people like Frezza to defame genuine good jokers like Irwin Jacobs and accusing Irwin and QUALCOMM of fraud, being part of a CDMA Mafia etc we must be careful to be truthful. I might ask that lawyer to take a case for me and sue L M Ericsson and their paid consultant Bill Frezza for defamation of my company, employees and products. They have done billions in damage with their false statements about IPR, about Jacobs, about QUALCOMM, about the 'CDMA Mafia', about cdmaOne, about chicken wire and bubblegum, about QUALCOMM to customers [the subject of a case by Q! against L M Ericsson], about QUALCOMM blocking the industry, about ownership of cdma soft hand off technology and much much more. All with a view to stopping cdmaOne developing a market presence so that they could continue to gain GSM sales. They have used a long and concerted effort to defame QUALCOMM, cdmaOne and cdma2000. I hope QUALCOMM has copied all those false, damaging and defamatory comments over the years.

To: Ruffian who wrote (19726)	12/14/1998 8:14:00 PM
From: JGoren	Respond to of 152472

michael, thanks for the post of tero's comments. I think his article is certainly food for thought and gives a better insight into where tero is coming from. I would, of course, like to know the responsive thoughts of others on the thread, including Gregg Powers, if he is so inclined. My reading is that, as an aside, Marc Cabi views the ultimate question to be determined by platform market share worldwide. Tero seems to focus on market share (and attendant economies of scale) but with an emphasis on handset volumes. Regardless, Tero does point out the problem, and risk, of investing in an upstart company that competes with larger, more entrenched players. Tero, however, ignores factors such as G* and WLL as they might play into the overall competitiveness of cdma. I assume therefore that he discounts those factors as relatively unimportant. Moreover, he totally ignores ASIC's where Qcom has true economies of scale. Finally, I would comment that if Qcom's IPR position is strong, it should win the Marshall, Texas lawsuit. I do not believe that the international standards bodies (specifically ITU) can or will force Qcom to cave in. What is probably misunderstood by persons who are not citizens of the U.S. is that patent protection was so important to the founding fathers of the United States that they actually provided for it in the Constitution of the United States. U.S. policy vis a vis patent protection for Qcom therefore is inherent and firm. P.S.: I add that I have now (after initial posting) seen Gregg's response.

To: Ruffian who wrote (19726)	12/15/1998 8:30:00 AM
From: tero kuittinen	Read Replies (7) \| Respond to of 152472

I can't prevent malicious people from posting my text... but could I at least ask for a link to be added after the illegal copy? Would that be a reasonable request? In the spirit of Christmas, Kwanzaa and Chanukkah? Or whatever dark and malevolent god you twisted copyright infringers worship in the dead of night? We are negotiating with advertisers and I have to keep up the hit growth of my columns. Yes, Tim, I want to be friends. And friends don't let friends buy QCOM - at least not without pointing out that the risks are considerable. This is not your father's retirement stock. Gregg, I genuinely appreciate our correspondance - even if you use it in public to bludgeon my credibility. It's a price I'm willing to pay. But I do not buy the licensing argument. I do not believe that any company can afford a semi-succesful handset division - the drain on resources is too big. The management track record of Qcom phone division is devastating - atrocious pricing, wrong strategic decisions (like producing the original Q-phone for a single digital band), bad plastic, software snags, questionable design, slow product roll-outs, delayed model introductions, market share losses, weak brand. Yes, I said market share losses. When someone else than Qualcomm is able to show that Dataquest's numbers are supposed to miss the mark by 100% I'm willing to reconsider - now there is little reason to think that Dataquest could be so colossally incompetent. Has everybody forgotten the debacle of early -98, when Qualcomm management said publicly that everything is A-OK... only to issue a profit warning a couple of days later? They are not more credible than Dataquest. And if this company undercounted Qualcomm sales, who says they didn't undercount the sales of other companies as well? These mistakes are usually systematic. Why the handset fixation - read about that later on in a column called "Why the handset fixation?" at: debry.com Happy Holidays to everyone but Michael, Tero