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

To: marginmike who wrote (21516)	1/18/1999 2:10:00 PM
From: The Prophet	Respond to of 152472

I'm not sure. When you own key intellectual property rights and earn your money based on royalties, but are also are a manufacturer, there is an inevitable tension between driving down prices to increase sales, and the resultant impact on manufacturing margins. To sit back and collect funds for ASICs and from royalties, while the most efficient manufacturers drive down costs (and margins), seems like a great plan. I would bet that every dollar a CDMA phone's price is reduced is more than offset by the increase in sales generated by the elasticity of the supply-demand curve. I'm sure that QCOM would get something extra from the PDQ anyway, if they cut a deal (i.e., an extra royalty or fee).

To: marginmike who wrote (21516)	1/18/1999 2:15:00 PM
From: gdichaz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

To marginmike: Point well taken. PDQ is exactly the kind of cutting edge product the Q needs to introduce and spread its adoption. BUT some other approach to handling the actual production of the handsets themselves might be possible. An example of sorts is the way that Sun Microsystems designs and upgrades its SPARC chips for its servers but has Intel and IBM actually produce them - then SUNW actually sells them embedded in its servers. Parallel inexact but perhaps something along that line possible. And an alliance with a big company with deep pockets could be helpful in infrastructure. Frankly some such arrangements might be less risky than being in bed with the evil empire (Microsoft) which has the reputation (deserved or not) of being a predator not a partner. Chaz