Qualcomm Is Prepared for Life After Apple

Qualcomm may be at state of war with one of its biggest smartphone customers, but Cristiano Amon, the president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT), doesn't sound fazed.

"Yes, at that place'south one big OEM that we will continue to piece of work hard to supply some of their volume, but in addition to that, we take seen tremendous growth in China, we have seen tremendous growth in the other customers with Samsung, and then nosotros've seen growth outside the telephone infinite. And on top of that, 5G is coming with a lot of new attributes," Amon told PCMag in an interview at Qualcomm'south Snapdragon Elevation.

The thicket of lawsuits now blooming between Qualcomm and Apple has dragged Qualcomm'south stock price down and may have prompted Broadcom's hostile takeover bid. While Apple relied on Qualcomm modem fries from the iPhone 4s through 6s generations, the big telephone maker has split its business between Qualcomm and Intel for ii cycles now, and may be preparing to become all-Intel in 2022.

"We've been very public in QCT. In early '16 we said, we're modeling our business assuming that a very large OEM is always going to [embrace] multi sourcing, and fifty-fifty multi tiering," Amon said. "Information technology was probably surprising to a lot of people that now that we take a total year of a dual source on that OEM, we saw QCT continue to grow. Just on non-phone business, we probably grew $3 billion."

Samsung and Huawei are also developing chips to compete with Qualcomm'south, meaning that all 3 of the world's pinnacle phone makers are trying to find alternatives to the earth's largest maker of mobile processors and modems.

iPhone X

Apple tree, Samsung, and Huawei may now be developing their ain processors, only that's a challenge Qualcomm has faced earlier, Amon pointed out.

"We may have a unlike scale at present given the corporeality of concentration we take. No question there's a concentration in the industry on the OEM side. Simply we always had it. In the early on days of even 2G, with Qualcomm CDMA, yous had companies like Samsung which had their own CDMA chips, y'all had Motorola with their own CDMA bit. If yous have enough scale that you can beget the R&D in the scale of a semiconductor business you do it. Nokia did it, everybody did it, nosotros always had that."

The telephone maker landscape is changing, Amon argued. The rise of Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo has opened up new markets for Qualcomm where there were none earlier, he said. Assuming that Apple switching away from Qualcomm will cripple Qualcomm's modem business organization merely assumes that there won't be whatsoever alter. And betting confronting change, in the smartphone globe, by and large hasn't been a good bet.

Qualcomm is also looking far beyond phones. The company'southward large announcement on the first day of its Snapdragon Summit was a trio of Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops, and the company is currently trying to buy chipmaker NXP to amend its position in cars.

"You can't really predict with any precision that the OEM landscape is going to be like that forever. And when yous get to a new generation, like 5G, y'all may create an entry indicate for many OEMs in the market. Information technology appears a bigger issue because the market place is concentrated, but we will just really be worried if the decision of the market place is that at that place'southward no more innovation in the telephone space. If that's not the case, it's a very dynamic market," Amon said.

Another Big 4G Jump Coming

Apple isn't making the best use of its Qualcomm modems, anyway. Talking to diverse experts here, I'm more than and more convinced that Apple not only crippled its Snapdragon X16 modems by deciding not to turn on 4x4 MIMO, only likewise tuned the X16 down to friction match the Intel XMM7480 modem's lesser operation. Our exclusive study of the Qualcomm and Intel iPhone 10 models found the two devices much closer in modem performance than nosotros saw last yr.

"You have to take techniques," Amon shrugged. "Some OEMs volition choose to bet on the innovation, some OEMs will choose only when the technology is mature."

Intel recently appear a one.6Gbps 4G LTE modem that would outpace annihilation Qualcomm has on offer just nosotros should expect to hear about some other leap in 4G technology from Qualcomm soon, which could put its modems once again safely alee of competitors, Amon said.

"5G is coming. You volition run across from us some other large jump in 4G before we go to 5G. Y'all should expect that in 2022 ... we may have nevertheless another big spring coming in 4G. We're merely not ready to denote it right now," he said.

Qualcomm'southward next big printing conference is at CES in early Jan, so nosotros might hear about it then.