Qualcomm (along with all tech stocks) seems to be on the cusp of something dramatic, either massively up or down. QCOM keeps struggling at $40 again, a 'post' it has not passed convincingly over the past 10+ years, but I keep thinking will this Mirasol plant announcement be the one, final 'leading indicator' that indicates a possible breakaway from this massive hurdle point. To this end, can people enlighten others on the following basic questions:
a) What makes the ARM (Snapdragon) architecture superior long term to Intel's X86 one? And while we are at it, what makes Snapdragon different from Samsung's Hummingbird one, since the latter is also ARM-based and likely now has all the intelligence 'stolen, learnt or adapted' from Apple's A4 chip, since they manufacture the latter for Apple?
b) How confident are people that telcos and OEMs are actually going to pay up QCT for the latter's royalty dues, since Apple seems to have got away by paying nothing to QCT on the Iphone 3G phone? As I look at the situation over the past 10 years, I am convinced QCT's 'acreage' of the smartphone's form factor has diminished and diminished relentlessly, as more and more non-QCT-owned features have been added to the smartphone while in parallel, the smartphone ASP has declined dramatically across the board, as people like Apple and Google have redrawn the economics of the smartphone business?
c) Is QCOM actually going to win with its tie up with Chinese manufacturers like ZTE and Huawei on the TD-LTE future? It seems to me that they've given away their crown jewels in their eagerness to beat WiMax to the ground while not gaining the 'core' strategic advantage from owning the CDMA IP.
d) Does anyone have a view or point me where I could get it on the Snapdragon all-in-1 design vs the other architectures like the Atom, A4 and now, Hummingbird where this chip seems to need lots of complimentary technologies embedded in others from the likes of Infineon, Marvell, Broadcom to make the full smartphone 'ecosystem'.
In sum, I keep thinking the big break for Qualcomm may never come, as so many like before, its great future will always keep dodging the present!
Many thanks for your valuable inputs. |
