InterDigital Inc (IDCC)

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SEOUL, May 19 (Reuters) -

U.S.-based wireless technology firm Qualcomm Inc. (QCOM.O: Quote, Profile, Research) expects slower global growth in demand for mobile phones this year due to a slow transition to next generation mobile services, its chief executive said on Thursday.

"Last year we saw very strong growth... and this year it will be little slower than that," Irwin Mark Jacobs, the chief executive officer of Qualcomm, told reporters on the sidelines of a telecoms forum in Seoul.

The lower forecast echoed earlier projections by market research group Gartner, which said in March that mobile phone sales would grow only 7 percent this year, after a 30 percent jump a year ago, as consumers will likely not upgrade to new models as often as last year.

Qualcomm cut its 2005 revenue target to a range of $5.5 billion to $5.7 billion in late April, citing global product inventory gluts and weak demand in Western Europe for advanced cell-phone services such as mobile video and Web surfing.

Qualcomm dominates the market for chips based on CDMA, a mobile phone standard popular in the United States and Asia, and sells technology licences and some chips for W-CDMA, a technology emerging in Europe.

Jacobs reiterated that Qualcomm, which sells technology licences for every W-CDMA phone sold and chips in some W-CDMA phones, expected 50 million worldwide shipments of such phones this calendar year, down from its earlier estimate for 55 million.

He also said Qualcomm was planning to offer trial services of television broadcasts via mobile phone in South Korea.

"We are discussing with a number of Korean broadcasters, content providers and operators," Jacobs said.

Qualcomm, which plans to spend about $800 million to build a network to broadcast TV to phones next year, expects video on phones to be the most popular advanced service.

It is now conducting trials with U.S. broadcasters for its mobile TV services.

The service, if it becomes commercially available in South Korea, will compete with satellite-based digital multimedia broadcasting services which had its commercial launch this month.

"MediaFlo (Qualcomm's TV network subsidiary) has sufficient capability..It will indeed win out over other technologies," Jacobs said.