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

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (29458)	5/7/1999 11:30:00 PM
From: FedWatcher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Warning! Long post. I respectively disagree. If anybody claims that he knows what the stock price would be at any particular time is just insane. QC has been making good money for years and yet its P/E has been very low until recently. Nobody could have predicted that the current P/E would leave our Galaxy and start approaching the edge of the Universe where all the Amazons and alike reside. Obviously, the deal was made in order to increase shareholders' value, so Irwin did know that the stock price would rise. But if you expect from him to predict exactly the degree of market enthusiasm or disappointment for any particular deal, then you attribute to him some supernatural qualities. About how infrastructure employees are treated. There is a lot of misunderstanding here. Remember, the division was losing money for years. There was no prospect for QCOM to make it profitable. The most obvious and simple option would have been to lay off all the people who worked there and close the shop. This would have eliminated all the losses. In that case all the laid off people would have got nothing, repeat nothing from their unvested options. Instead, a different solution was found where majority of the employees got to keep their jobs whiteout even having to leave the town. Options in high tech industry are given to employees to make them interested in contributing to the overall success of the company. This is a very important principle. If you do not contribute in any shape or form to the success of, say, Microsoft would they give you any options? The same is with this unvested portion of their options. Since they stop contributing to the success of QCOM why should QCOM keep giving them their options? I would find it extremely unreasonable. Of course, these employees are disappointed that they would not get those options. But nobody promised them some sort of employment for life. It is a part of the game that you may lose your job or something like that. These options are not entitlement. It is a reward for contribution. Not contribution, no reward. As simple as that. To soften the blow, QCOM came up with the some sort of retention plan. I do not know the details of this plan but what I read in the press it is very generous. They should accept this plan. If they don't and choose to go to court, then they will most likely lose much more. So I think that QCOM has treated these people extremely well. Motorola does not have any stock options for its employees, neither does Ericy. So when 15000 Motorola employees got laid off last year or 10000 employees got laid off from Ericsson did they get some sort of retention plan? I do know think so. Irwin in my opinion is very fair to the employees and to us, shareholders. Cheers... EinC1