There is no promotion of competition (typo) through heavy handed licensing. Look at the IC industry, Ericson, Freescale,TI, Broadcom, Nvida, and so on, all quit mobile business. In fact, it is the licensing practice that prevents competition, when QC would act out anti-competitively by withhold licensing, bundling, forcing cross licensing, on and on. All those things are in findings from regulator investigations across the world. Licensing itself is controversial, but the crust of the problem is QC is also in chip business. IC companies are the enabler of the mobile growth, and QC is squashing them with licensing. Why do you think China insists on home brew TD?
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Apple does it (massive buybacks), and they are model citizens of innovation! They just invented the digital watch, and rumor has it they are still inventing something called the "television". CRAZY STUFF MAN! CRAZY.
Unfortunately, shares buyback is NOT R&D. It is one of the most brain-dead ways for management to increase shareholder value in the short-term.
After all if management has the vision or the guts to increase shareholder value by investing the shares buyback money into cutting edge innovation research, why wouldn't they do it? The fact that we cut back on R&D instead of doubling down when the financial heat is up is an indication that our management lacks the vision or the guts, or both, to be a true innovation-driven company. Talking innovation is easy, actually doing it take brains and guts, coz innovation is as hard as it is risky.
"nvesting our R&D into non-wireless areas". Is that what spending half of company cash hoard on buying back shares is called?
@Anonymous75722. Why would anybody spend a boatload of money to acquire AMD so that we get more of our business into an even redder ocean？ The very reason we are investing our R&D into non-wireless areas is to get into new "blue ocean" areas. You need to get with the program or at least read some books on business before mouthing off more nonsense about what companies are arrogant. It has nothing to do with that. I'm sorry.
Many QC guys don’t get this historic fact that when a company reaches a dominant position, it naturally become monopolistic and abusive of that position. We did not become dominant by just making the best chips; we used licensing to help the chip business. Any box makers always want to have multiple supply sources to keep the price in check. QC needs to protect its position, and so, it use licensing to coerce phone makers to buy only from QC, or face stiffer licensing deal. Sound right from capitalistic view, right? Wrong, it is anticompetitive in every country, maybe except for Middle East and Africa, where they don’t make phones.
Lastly, if Qualcomm really wants to create a bigger threat in the PC business versus intel, I'd say QC should acquire AMD before someone else picks them up. AMD's financial situation is deteriorating and they could be in a much bigger threat to intel these days with a sufficient cash infusion from a bigger parent. If QC executives really believe QC is on a collision course with intel, they would be putting money where their mouth is and going after that business with a credible threat. Of course, knowing how QC operates, it often is arrogant and thinks that it can do thing better than everything else, even in things that others have been doing for decades. So either QC isn't serious about entering the PC markets or is so arrogant that it's trying to do what others have been doing for decades. In a way, intel has the opposite problem. It's so arrogant it thinks it can enter the wireless/mobile business by building everything themselves too. And considering this isn't their first time trying to do this, I'd say they have a pretty good chance of failing this time around if they keep up with their arrogance.
The "heavy handed licensing" isn't qualcomm's problem. The problem is with qualcomm's attempt to heavy hand license AND also be a chip maker at the same time. That said, the main reason competitors dropped out of the LTE market is simple. All of them figured out it isn't profitable in china for them to do. The only ones that are profitable is QCOM for the high end, Media Tek (that has a killer reference design that allows customers to get to the market much faster than QC or anyone else for that matter and for which customers are willing to pay a lot for) and the domestic Chinese companies that go for the low end at a fraction of the cost. All the rest of the former players make more money doing something else. And as such, most of the other former LTE players are doing much better as a company now that they pulled out of the market. My prediction is that Marvel's LTE business will eventually be sold too, in whole or part, simply because they won't be able to keep up at the low end with the domestic chinese player. Intel's a threat only from the perspective that they have a boatload of money to burn through and don't mind taking billions in losses to attempt to "buy" customers to gain market share, at least in the near term. And they can afford to do this because they still have a big monopoly in the PC business, that despite what QC executives like to say, QC hasn't made a dent in terms of grabbing PC business away from intel. In fact, all that hoopla of ARM for the desktop is pretty much dead. So intel in the near term will most likely keep pumping money it has into trying to grab market share at a loss. One thing that is also a game changer is Samsung's launch of its own app processor. This might be an issue because it means any sort of package deal that qualcomm use to have with Samsung with LTE + connectivity solution is essentially broken up now, where QC was hoping to grab the entire baseband+connectivity market with one packaged product. So other connectivity players are now back in play. This problem might also be exacerbated if Samsung is successful in selling their app processor to other OEMs. Because if it is able to do so and undercut snapdragons, then QC's bundled LTE+connectivity deals for OEMs will also start to fall apart. Apple is a good example of what happens when QC doesn't control the entire solution. Qualcomm doesn't have the entire package in any of the iPhones. Apple uses its own app processor, and uses Qualcomm's baseband, and the rest comes from the best OEMs for their respective core competencies.
Samsung will do the same now too. That said, Samsung is in big trouble, especially in China, where they been losing a lot of market share to the chinese players. Watch out for Xiaomi..They very well might be a game changer....
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