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

To: JGoren who wrote (30126)	5/16/1999 11:04:00 AM
From: Valueman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Zinc-Air disposable cell batteries offering up to 30 days standby: electric-fuel.com Samsung internet phone: samsungelectronics.com; Good explanation of standby time variation due to "slot cycle" choices of the different carriers: mot.com

To: JGoren who wrote (30126)	5/16/1999 11:17:00 AM
From: CDMQ	Respond to of 152472

The coverage of the Q in the local press has been much more even handed since the last shareholders' meeting. The writer Mike Drummond has done a good job. As Qualcomm sorts itself out after a frenzied start and a near flameout, 700 jettisoned employees learn to cope with life off the telecom campus Staff Writer May 16, 1999 hiring frenzy virtually unprecedented in the history of San Diego' s private sector. In 1990, Qualcomm had 400 employees. By the end of last year, the company had more than 11,000 workers, an explosion of 2,650 percent in the span of eight years. Driven by evangelical zeal to spread its mobile phone technology, the company was building an empire. Qualcomm was hiring people before positions even existed, a common practice at Microsoft and at high-tech firms in Silicon Valley. "I was approaching managers and executives warning them that they were hiring too fast," recalls David Blaine, a former software process improvement engineer at Qualcomm. "They would say, ' Yeah, we know! It' s great! We' ve got all kinds of business.' " That aggressive cowboy ethos served the company well during its formative years, when it was out to prove that not only did its mobile phone technology work, but it worked better than the competition' s. By 1998, Qualcomm had accomplished that goal. It also had become clear that one of the company' s once-essential business units was terminally ill. The infrastructure division that made cell sites -- closet-sized base stations that keep mobile phones connected to the regular phone network -- was an anchor dragging at company earnings to the tune of about $30 million a quarter. So, on a sunny Tuesday morning this year, after nearly a decade of running full-speed, Qualcomm slammed on the breaks. On that second day in February, 700 mostly full-time employees were thrown off campus in the largest, most jarring round of job cuts in the company' s 14-year history. Who were these people? Some were key players overseas, spearheading Qualcomm' s signature mobile phone technology -- code division multiple access, or CDMA. Others worked in the trenches at the infrastructure division, developing the expensive base stations that make CDMA work. Still others had sacrificed weekends, holidays, T-ball games and anniversaries for the good of the Qualcomm collective -- and, of course, the promise of lucrative stock options. In a series of interviews with those former Qualcomm employees, themes of pain, perseverance and layered paradox emerge. Here was Qualcomm, San Diego County' s flagship telecommunications company in the heart of Wireless Valley, laying off telecom professionals during a raging bull market and rock-bottom unemployment. Here was a company forced to carve many workers from its infrastructure division, the unit that proved the commercial viability of CDMA and created a hamster-pace demand for the technology, but one that failed itself to turn a profit. The irony is that the layoffs, coupled with the sale in late March of the infrastructure division to Swedish rival Ericsson, quadrupled Qualcomm' s stock price and made the company the toast of Wall Street. Copyright 1999 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.