We’re dedicated to support African Market -Qualcomm President

The Qualcomm Editors’ Week ended recently in San Diego, California, the President, Qualcomm, Steve Mollenkopf was in session and shared views on industry issues with the Group Executive Editor, REMMY NWEKE who was there for DigitalSENSE Business News.

THIS year, being the first year, just in the year, I think mid-year we had a few working on that.

More so than the 2008 annual supply and today, we also said that exceeding Q4 demand would be much; we think we are going to be out of that problem here at the end of this month.  So I don’t see that as an issue. Moving forward, it’s something that we have this year than the last fiscal year.  

Most of the data used here more or less depicting an Asian market; I want to ask how serious does Qualcom take African market? There may be some challenges but looking at the emerging market, we cannot forget about Africa entirely.

It’s a couple of thing; one is the emerging market or non international market. Over the years, the business really was supported by Japan, Korea and North America, and we have been able to grow that into Europe and a number of market places. China continues to be a market for us but then what we have said is that we would invest to develop new markets. 

Africa being one of then, there is a number of our traditional infrastructure partners that are also in Africa and we will continue to partner with them.

We also have dedicated offices to support our business in Africa. Essentially, what we do in Africa, East Europe, Brazil, Latin America and South-East Asia is that a lot of the businesses market for us, their job essentially is to form a world-wide insight with the use of our chipset into these markets. We have been excited about that because what happens is, we think that with the low cost smart phone, you get the situation with the penetration of the internet, and the penetration of 3G smartphone would happen together. And I think you have the situation as a lot of people would get on the internet for the first time because there is now availability of low-cost smartphones.

We have been investing heavily to enable that to occur, we have been doing this and our traditional chipset is trying to provide the channel to make sure that we can see those markets as well as our traditional markets. It’s becoming more and more about business.

If you provide a very perfective products, you would either pay more or engineers in China because for the other world, you need more engineers, how do you balance the engineer employment and the return on investment?

What we did, where started seven years ago is that we have invested in China, primarily in Chinghai and also in Beijing, in teams and their job was to take our durational chipset to create a design that more people can use. So our strategy actually is to invest in Chinese local market with engineers helping to develop those parts not only close to the market but also close to the OEMs that would use that. Not only that we have been doing that, our strategy actually is to invest in markets.

But what is interesting is that it attracts more and more customers. It’s not one size fits all in terms of what customers need with the reference design. Large customers want one thing, some of them want what they can make adjustment to, and some of the smaller customers might not be able to make changes. That’s bothering our portfolio but we have been doing that actually in the local market. We have been investing in China to do that.

Your competitors have more than two thousand engineers in China but you have only about two hundred engineers, the speed would need more engineers.

We are definitely not done. We would continue to invest heavily. If you follow our finances you would see that we have been growing our finances and our projections in this fiscal year in terms of what we have invested in; one of the key areas is continuing to grow this portion of our business.

Qualcomm is a big company, could you please tell us more about the programme?

A couple of things are involved, with the advent of smartphones, the consumer is more desired to find out what is inside the phone and that’s a great thing. For us, what we do is to try to provide some of the tools that are necessary so that consumers who are interested can know. There are differences in the way people market phone and that of personal computer. What needs to be understood is that more and more of the growth of mass market smartphones are happening outside of traditional carrier channel  and as we do that it is not traditional smart-self branding which is the carrier. There is some in the open market and in the store, and we want to ensure that we help our OEMs partners with some of the tools that would enable them to communicate the unique proposition that we have.

We have seen what happened in some areas as we start developing market in Europe; we have seen the same thing happen in Latin America and in the developing world as well. So you are going to see more and more of that from us, it’s very different I think from the traditional PC type approach, but there are elements out there that we think are appropriate.

Is the company just specific about smartphone of some brands or some models to specific market?

It depends, we tend to do targeted programmes with either carrier channel partners or with OEMs, you will see more and more of that from us.

Is there specific market for most phones?

That is one of the areas where we think is important to communicate what is inside the phone and why we think this phone is better than other phones. There is a real desire for people to find out what is inside their phone and I think we have premium product to make sure that people know about it.

Is there any significant difference between your strategy for developed world and developing market?

It depends on the markets. For the developing market in general, our strategy is bent on getting the cost of smartphone down so that we can accelerate the transition of mobile internet in those economies and we have been doing that, if you have seen our roadmap over the years, we have been investing in that.

The second phase is developing things with the reference design to enable more and different types of OEMs who may have special relationships with particular channels that can go into these markets to enable them use our chipset, so we have been broadening a number of different channels that can use our chipset. Even in the developing world, technology business is enormous domain for future operating, for newest technology and so we think that the assets that we bring from our traditional developing market business are also important to the developing world. That is very much of our feature; a lot of our businesses are already servicing those markets. 

In India for example, we have been in India for over ten years and it’s one of the places we learn a lot and one of the things we learn is about CDMA, we have learnt how to bring the cost of CDMA to compete against GSM, and the lesson today is still important as smartphones is becoming primary devices replacing the edge devices.

Looking at the industry, emerging market in the next few years, is there substantial growth coming?

Yes, particularly in the channels where we have substantial resources today, in India, China, we are growing in Latin America, Eastern Europe and we are consistent with the strategy. We think in terms of smartphone, we are going to be a big accelerator of 3G as well as the internet, and we have the resources to do that.

What is the initial roll-out of 3G in Africa, and even that of the uptakes?

I don’t actually have the number from the latest committee, and I don’t have global or direct information . 

We have not done anything significant in the very low and average market; we think of that market, Can we serve quite well from the phone or the so called tablet? No one knows the different between phones and tablets, so we will put a lot of strategies up but we have not been doing targeting products for the ultra low market. 

It is an interesting market and there is a lot, and nothing really differentiates itself in that market. What we are really targeting more on is what I considered to be connected. And more coming in the place of PC and I think it’s there for the trend but we have had a better focus so far. 

What is your perspective on the development of the trend of the increasing number of laptops?

The industry is changing, much faster than what people think; the move for mobility and the importance of having access for mobility, that of the phone and the extension of the phone, and that’s a very different perspective of product from what we have on the PC. We have to talk about that from power, because power is really a bundle of technology, you have to have modem, connectivity, GPS, graphics, CPU and when you talk about CPU of all these things, particularly as more and more things move to the cloud. As your services move to the cloud, you need to be connected to the cloud all the time.

The model to rap all the technologies in some easy way for some millions to create and work on, that’s the different and that’s exactly what you need to do in terms of smartphones. So we think it set up very well so that the smartphones, tablets would be the primary projection of anybody. We, by the way have been believers of that for some time, and you have seen it in ways we are investing in our road mapping.

I think the evolution of the smartphone, tablets would eventually replace the PC. We have one coming with the phone and one with the traditional PC in terms of technology, designs and all of that. I don’t think PC itself would disappear but the viral might definitely shift.

When you say PC mobile, what is your definition of PC?

Today, if you look at the next generation of PCs, they are going to have almost all the functionalities and all of it is trying to use the same thing that is coming over from the phones and tablets. In mind, it’s actually transition very rapidly and put by the same ecosystem providers that protect the business. I think there is the need to provide a different type of computing experience, you see that in the projections as well.

I want to know the objectives of recent acquisitions Qualcomm made  especially that of the Sonic micro?

In general, when we do acquisition primarily what we do is that we are looking for technology that would go alongside our traditional technology of our chipset in devices. One thing that we look out for is interesting technology that we can use to offer a platform in the case that you mentioned designing our network with the Israeli companies. We have some products in technology that enable us to go into the market faster and of course it’s a big component of our strategy, it helped us in our respective routine with technology and products to the market earlier.

Sonic Micro, that gave us the chance to fast-charging of phone with camera, as phones are becoming more and more PC, the batteries to be used require different charging technology, so we ended up buying the company that has the technology. And we continue to do that as a company.

We have two different technologies that we are working on, those are primarily supporting the licensing model but more and more, we are displaying our component on phone, tablet and it’s important that it works quite well. So, we have for many years and we will continue to have close relationship with different set of companies.

We are always on the lookout for making sure that our chipset works well with the latest technology.  Anytime that there is new technology, we are very interested in finding our way and taping into that market to keep the industry moving.

What are the strategies for putting or playing in the chipset industry?

Our general strategy is as things become more important, we tend to put them into the chipset, so for example when something is better provided, overtime we tend to make the decision. Though we haven’t done that yet but our general strategy has been more and more into the chip so that we can deliver our greatest skill to our partners. 

We don’t talk about anything when we have something in the pipeline but I don’t have much to say on our future clients. I do believe that the value of providing computing platform for customers which is easier.

How do you see the future market for your company in Latin America?

In general, we are very excited about what we think is going to happen in Latin America, particularly in Brazil, because there has been a number of interesting developments this year in terms of smartphones, the government of Brazil made some interesting rules to accelerate the transition of smartphones. We have been doing a lot of pretty interesting things.

We focus our business on a particular class of products before we are really working on getting into the phone space. We have brought that back on different class of products now. We are still excited by our product to reflect the display, and enable the different display which we think the industry would enjoy its rewards. We are trying to do a number of work that help people to understand it.

Eventually, what we think would happen is that a lot of these devices wouldn’t be off in the future. I think there would be a lot of development momentum around the so called briefcase. You can imagine things on the wall; you can imagine a lot of things around the wall that is very attractive.

Why is Qualcomm particularly interested in battery technology?

The rate of increase of battery technology and the desire.

 

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