it actually began in 2005 when three other companies tried to acquire Bitboys. “We are a rare company. In 1995-96 there were 70 companies of this field in the world. Now there’s just a handful left.”
After operating Bitboys for almost 2 ½ years, AMD sold its mobile division, which included 250 employees around the world, to San Diego’s Qualcomm. According to Saari, Qualcomm wanted the Bitboys team unchanged, and Qualcomm’s chief financial officer William Keitel now oversees Qualcomm Finland as chairman.
“We had a lot of challenges with AMD and their several layoff rounds,” Saari says. “Now we can concentrate on business. I just heard it being said that ‘these dudes couldn’t have gotten a better home.'”
For Mika Tuomi, the big mental change came when Canada’s ATI acquired his company. “It wasn’t easy,” he says. “It was your child leaving home.”
Tuomi now feels proud their activity resulted in Qualcomm coming to a small village. “A lot of people here in Noormarkku are surprised that Qualcomm has bigger market value than Nokia,” he says.
As for the Qualcomm-Nokia rivalry, the two wireless giants settled a three-year old legal battle just six months before Qualcomm bought AMD’s mobile chip division. Since then, Qualcomm and Finland’s mobile giant have announced that they are now developing advanced mobile phones for North America. But just what that means in hard to say.
After asking Saari about Bitboys’ possible role in the Nokia-Qualcomm collaboration, he answered with his first, “no comment.” He added, “You can guess it is kind of a huge question for us.”