Soon they'll work better ...
dwdkc,
<< ... the pessimism over their potential WCDMA market share provides one of the really strong "investable opportunities" at the current time. I'm no expert but based on the results to date, do they not have a significant lead in chips that actually work? >>
No. Unfortunately Qualcomm does not have any lead in UMTS chipsets that "actually work," and in fact trail the pack at the moment, but hopefully that will change shortly.
Maybe soon handsets will deliver using a Qualcomm chipset that are competitive with handsets using chipsets by others, and which "work" as well, but that day has not yet come, and Qualcomm's largest CDMA customer, who intends to use Qualcomm MSM6250 chipsets in the future, is delivering 2 models of UMTS/WCDMA handsets powered by EMP that do work very well, with 2 more EMP powered models coming soon. Six weeks ago Canning FOK of Hutchison '3' told the global Lehman Brothers telecom team when they met with him in Hong Kong:
The company currently finds the Qualcomm chipsets not very stable on 3G phones, and prefers the ERICY (EMP) chipset. ... Hutchison confirmed that its preferred WCDMA chipset vendor remains Ericsson Mobile Platforms( EMP) who have been supplying LG. EMP’s leadership appears to reflect the stability and longer battery life that it chips enable.
The single Qualcomm MSM6200 powered UMTS handset currently available commercially in Europe today (Samsung SGH-Z105) is a marginal performer.
The two Qualcomm MSM6200 powered WCDMA models (by Sanyo) currently available in Japan today do not come remotely close to outperforming their competitors and although Vodafone has seven new models launching in Japan in coming weeks none are powered by Qualcomm chipsets.
Vodafone is due to launch 10 new qualified models in Europe tomorrow and it will be interesting to see how many are actually in stock at retail. Two from Samsung use Qualcomm chipsets. The rest do not. The Qualcomm powered Samsung SGH-Z107 is the smallest of the lot, and I'm sure it will perform better than the Z105 but it doesn't have a very impressive feature set. The SGH-Z110 kicks the feature set up a notch and has a great display but goes from slim to obese in the process, and in several respects doesn't have features to match some of the models coming on stream from its competitors all of whom have chipsets that work well.
At least two MSM6250 models (LG, and Sanyo) appear to be on the relatively near term horizon at TIM, O2, and Orange, but haven't yet made a commercial appearance. Those are what we've been waiting for, but they may have to work out a few kinks before they are stable.
As for market share, Qualcomm does have no place to go but up, and will certainly improve in coming months.
Best,
- Eric -
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