environment, Jacobs says Qualcomm ended fiscal 2009 with more than $10.4 billion in revenue, with cash flow of more than $7 billion—and more than $19 billion in available cash. Qualcomm has estimated its revenue will increase by 6 percent this year; it is expected to hit a figure somewhere between $10.4 billion and $11.1 billion in fiscal 2010. “We still expect the wireless 3G market to grow roughly 20 percent year-over-year,” Jacobs says. Demand for smartphones also is expected to increase, and Jacobs says that by next year, “smartphone shipments will exceed all computer shipments.”
In short, Jacobs says Qualcomm is riding a powerful wave that is making the cell phone into “more and more of a computing device and more and more of a consumer electronics device.” As always, the wireless giant is bullish in its outlook and aggressive in driving its technologies to expand into the mobile broadband infrastructure and wireless Internet capabilities.
Some other highlights of Jacobs’ outlook for 2010 and beyond:
—Smartphones, which made up about 20 percent of all handset sales in 2009, will increase to about 40 percent of the market by 2014.
—The number of 3G subscribers worldwide, which amounted to about 200 million in 2005, climbed to 945 million in 2009—and is expected to hit 2.7 billion in 2014. Emerging markets in China, India, and other regions are expected to account for 50 percent of 3G handset shipments by 2012. Jacobs says, “The phone in many of these markets is going to be the only computer that many of these people will ever see.”
—In China, the growth in CDMA subscribers is projected to increase 1,000 percent from 2008 to 2013—from 28 million to more than 318 million subscribers. In India, where CDMA technology is more established, the growth rate is projected at 160 percent over the same period. (CDMA, for code division multiple access, is the radio protocol long favored by Qualcomm for voice communications.)
—Likewise, the number of 3G operators around the world increased from 160 in 2005 to 615 last year.
Ultimately, Jacobs says the acceleration and expansion of Qualcomm’s technologies will come together to make possible his visionary scene from the future. He says, “The people who saw Qualcomm as the CDMA company in the past now see us as a broad-based wireless technologies company.”
