Qualcomm Inc (QCOM)

[stricklybiz]

Thank you, khemara. The Ericsson cat says a couple of things that seem to cry out for educated criticism, for which I'm not really equipped.

<<Ericsson has swapped its rich WCDMA patent portfolio with that of Qualcomm in a cross-licensing deal with virtually closed wallets, but smaller players in the WCDMA market without their own WCDMA technology will be forced to pay to use it.

<<"(On top of the Qualcomm royalties) then we (Ericsson, Nokia and others) have to charge for our technology. That's the problem, because it means handsets will become too expensive. We want cheap handsets. That drives infrastructure (investments)," Sundstroem said.>>

The first paragraph above says in effect that Ericsson does not pay royalties to Q. The next paragraph say that Ericsson does pay royalties to Q.

The Ericsson's guy says Q holds 15 percent of the WCDMA patents, whereas the analyst Thelander says Q has about 20 percent of the "essential" patents. The (unanswered) question arises, Who holds more patents than Q? What royalties--or what percentage of a European pool of WCDMA royalties--does that firm derive? If Thelander's 20-percent guess is correct (and it is more likely so than Ericsson's guess), is Q receiving more than 20 percent of total WCDMA royalties?

Note that Reuters, not Thelander calls WCDMA "the mobile phone technology for better voice and faster data communications such as video." Note that Reuters--hardly rooting for our side--is the service that cannot say the word "terrorist."

I know, I know. I'm about as unbiased as CFO Karl-Henrik.