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

To: Gregg Powers who wrote (20509)	12/29/1998 12:55:00 PM
From: tero kuittinen	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 152472

Look - if you go to any American discussion group centering on mobile phones you'll hear people griping about the Q-phone stand-by times. I'm talking about people who take the phone to the work and have to sometimes spend time in areas where the reception is bad. You know - real life conditions. Q-phone loses out to almost all major brands. By now I know that many people do not think this is a problem. Fine. By next summer, market share information will tell us who is right and who is wrong. Your response was not fact-based - it was anecdotal. One consumer, perhaps living in an area of optimal reception, can't draw any real conclusions. I know for a fact that there are people on this thread that are sorely disappointed by Q-phone's specs. For reasons we all know, few are willing to stand up to public ridicule by saying what they think. BTW, I didn't think that the ability to send e-mail and short messages is a "stale" issue, since it has been carefully avoided in this thread. I don't think it's a "style" issue, either. I think it's a substance issue. As most people know, Nokia's next generation CDMA phones should arrive by spring. They give us a real idea of the CDMA manufacturing skills of the company. Why on earth should Nokia be making 61xx CDMA phones now, when it can't even make enough 61xx GSM and TDMA phones to meet the demand? It makes no sense for them to divert capacity from GSM and TDMA handsets into CDMA as long as everything they make sells out immediately. The GSM phone market will do just fine after W-CDMA debuts - initially the third generation networks are meant for big cities and can't start to replace GSM coverage for years and years. This is why W-CDMA phones are designed to operate in GSM networks: they need to utilize the existing infrastructure to give a wide coverage. This is why the market for W-CDMA phones will probably be dominated by GSM manufacturers: the third generation phones need to be both W-CDMA and GSM. I think we all know who has the edge. If the ASICS business really is a goldmine, how come nobody believes that? Even if Nokia outsources it ASICS, who do you think will pocket most of the profit from the handsets that are sold? It looks like Wall Street has made up its mind about that. Who cares about Philips anyway? They were arguably the worst-performing handset manufacturer in the world in 1998. The big debate in Europe is about whether Philips will exit handset manufacturing entirely in 1999 before the division drags the entire consortium into red. What matters is the way big operators, Japanese manufacturers, Korean manufacturers and European manufacturers are investing in W-CDMA. Not to mention Motorola and Nortel. As you know, I have not stated that Qualcomm will not win the battle and get all they want. I have stated that they are in a perilous position and there is a huge risk for the investors. I'm not the one who claims to know with certainty how this will end. Tero