For those who don't know Qualcomm, it is a fabless chip design company founded in 1985 by Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi. The company is famous for Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) chips, which in fact, is still the dominant technology for telecommunications nowadays. The current CEO of the company, Paul Jacobs is our fellow alumnus graduating in 1989 with a Ph.D. in EECS. Qualcomm has been doing really well recently, with the global trend of the increasing sales of smartphones and wireless communication devices. Qualcomm (San Diego) reported record quarterly sales of $6.02 billion, up 24 percent from the previous quarter and up 29 percent compared with the year ago quarter. The company reported a net income for the quarter of $2.2 billion, up 42 percent from the previous quarter. Why it has such an awesome performance?
From the news that Qualcomm has lifts sales target after record quarter, Paul Jacobs, the CEO of Qualcomm, said Qualcomm now has more than 225 CDMA licensees. “We continue to invest and innovate across a broad set of technologies and believe that our patent portfolio applicable to 3G and 4G products is the most widely licensed in the industry,” Jacobs said.
This shows the importance of patents for tech companies to sustain their competitiveness. It would be interesting to see if it can maintain its aggressive expansion in patent development, and how would it further affect the company sales.
This is very interesting, thanks for sharing! My question is, though, when does owning too many patents turn into being a monopoly? It's great for qualcomm that they've licensed their patents and have achieved the lead market share, but at what point can they be accused of being a monopoly?
ReplyDeleteYuval, every tech company is trying to be a monopoly essentially :) The fact that being the monopoly means the collapse of Qualcomm's competitors such as Marvell, which was found by Berkeley alumni Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai (as you may know, Sutardja Dai Hall is named after them). But I don't see Qualcomm being the monopoly because of the competitiveness of the IC industry. Qualcomm is a new rising star, but in my opinion, it is far from being a absolute dominant fabless company.
Delete