Scenes from the Qualcomm Shareholder Meeting: Five Years Under New Management

new management and an opportunity to rattle us. We really weren’t set up to litigate that big of a global war.”

Qualcomm reached a comprehensive settlement with Broadcom in 2009 that ended all litigation, after agreeing to pay the Irvine, CA-based chipmaker $891 million without making changes to its technology licensing business model. (The company’s lawyers also got a black eye from sanctions issued in the case in 2008 by a San Diego federal magistrate, who rescinded the sanctions last year after determining that her previous findings of misconduct during the Broadcom litigation were not deliberate, but instead resulted from “an incredible breakdown in communication.”)

Paul Jacobs

Jacobs didn’t say anything more about Broadcom, although he did mention that past “attacks” by competitors have eased. In fact, he noted that Qualcomm has been working closely with Nokia on developing technology for their high-end mobile phones that use Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system.

The Qualcomm CEO, who succeeded his father as chairman in 2009, also acknowledged that the wireless giant also stumbled with FLO-TV, its mobile television service that is scheduled to be shut down later this month. “It was a good risk to take, but at the end of the day, people were not willing to pay that extra amount for cable TV that was already available in their homes,” Jacobs said. All is not lost, however, since Qualcomm has agreed to sell its FLO-TV wireless capacity to AT&T for $1.93 billion—and Jacobs said Qualcomm also has been developing technology to will help AT&T use its newly acquired spectrum to offload certain types of traffic on its network.

Such setbacks, though, seem relatively minor when cast against the backdrop of long-term growth that Paul Jacobs sketched for shareholders. He identified the migration from 2G to 3G devices as a major growth driver for Qualcomm, along with the proliferation of smartphones, tablet computers, USB modems, and other devices using Qualcomm chipsets. With more than 100 new smartphone models introduced during the first half of 2010, he said mobile devices are shifting increasingly from something you hold against your ear to something you hold in both hands as you play games, respond to e-mail, and browse the Internet.

He also charted the growth in wireless connectivity among devices that aren’t mobile phones at all, but televisions, printers, and game consoles. Qualcomm hasn’t sold its chips into such markets before, Paul Jacobs noted, but with Qualcomm’s $3.1 billion acquisition of San Jose-based Atheros Communications, the company can expand its technology into new access points.

“In the end,” he said, “what makes us do this so well is our ability to integrate into a host of different devices.”

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.