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Qualcomm fears it is being squeezed
MOBILE CHIPMAKER Qualcomm seems to be a little worried about getting squeezed in the high-end handset market.
Qualcomm is supplying mobile phone chips to Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and HTC.
But according to Digitimes, competition is apparently getting fiercer and the popular phones do not have Qualcomm's 3G chips.
To make matters worse for Qualcomm, its sales teams are unlikely to penetrate the halls of other phone manufacturers either.
Motorola has a tight relationship with Freescale Semiconductor, while Nokia and Sony Ericsson are unlikely to move away from ST-Ericsson.
If you believe Digitimes, Qualcomm is apparently so concerned that it has been seen at Apple's Cupertino headquarters offering sacrifices to the great god Steve Jobs.
If the outfit can secure a deal with Jobs' Mob it might land in easy street. But there are fears that it could suffer from a change in the minds of the fickle phone buying public.
Handset vendors have been promoting low-cost smartphones, meaning they tend to adopt low-priced chipsets instead of more expensive chips from Qualcomm.
We had a word with Qualcomm and it says that its chips are in, amongst others, the BlackBerry Storm 2, the BlackBerry Tour, the Motorola Cliq and the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.
Not only that, but the Palm Pre wireless interface is run by a Qualcomm MSM6801A processor. Rather than being locked out of talks with Nokia it is in a partnership with the outfit to Develop Advanced Mobile Devices together, a Qualcomm spokesperson told us. µ
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For one thing, Jobs can't be anything less than furious with Infineon after they badly screwed up the chipset on the iPhone 3G. The Infineon chipset is the main reason (even more than AT&T's craptastic network) that it drops calls and has crappy signal strength. And no, they couldn't fix it in software - they could only try to mask it a little bit. While Qualcomm would surely love that business, I doubt they have to crawl in on their hands and knees. Either Steve Jobs has been replaced with a kinder, gentler, more forgiving double (fat fucking chance), or the business is up for grabs.
For another thing, chips or no chips, nobody can build a 3G or 4G phone without cutting Qualcomm a check to use their patents.
Finally, Qualcomm allegedly maintains quite a bit of CDMA- and 3G/4G-related "secret sauce" outside of their patent portfolio (so they don't have to disclose it / make it public).
Qualcomm fears it is being squeezed / Qualcomm fears it cannot squeez like before
If this is true, it could be because of the way that Qualcomm used its portfolio of Wideband CDMA patents to strong arm phone and other chip manufacturers over the past decade.
I'm waiting for this to happen to Rambus too.
Qualcomm was ranked 13th in 2007 in the semiconductor top 20. Then 8th and now 6th in 2009. As one of the few companies they didn't have a decline in revenue in 2009. They have their own cpu in the form of Snapdragon which is widely used in all highend smartphones/pda's/netbooks. Snapdragon is the highest performing ARM core around (being faster than Cortex-A8, Marvell Shiva, ...). They bought ATI's mobile gpu division. They are using Imageon gpu's now exclusively.
Really ... they can't be that worried?
didn't they buy a chip maker not too long ago? surely they're keen to make their own chips..