Qualcomm Tumbles After Losing U.S. Antitrust Ruling

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-22/qualcomm-shares-drop-after-company-loses-u-s-antitrust-ruling

by jweir • 7 years ago

185 48 7 years ago

ksec2• 7 years ago

FOSS Patents [1] has blogged about it, although I believe the site tends to be a little Pro Apple in its narrative ( And that is speaking as someone who like Apple ), it does provide a decent summary.

[1] http://www.fosspatents.com/2019/05/breaking-news-federal-tra...

wyldfire2• 7 years ago

"Qualcomm’s royalty rates are unreasonably high" (Section G). That holding will hurt Qualcomm, though it's common sense. They simply charge a lot more than the rest of the industry--from the perspective of some major OEMs, more than the rest of the industry combined.

Gee, I don't know: if their modem is superior, then why shouldn't they get superior share of the market? That's not anticompetitive if they make a better product. BTW if they capture the majority share then it's totally expected that they should get "more than the rest of the industry combined."

gvb• 7 years ago

Alternate quote from the judge: “Qualcomm’s licensing practices have strangled competition” in certain modem chip markets “for years, and harmed rivals, OEMs and end consumers in the process”.

Strangling competition and harming rivals is how you (illegally) get and maintain a superior share of the market.

mbreese• 7 years ago

if their modem is superior, then why shouldn't they get superior share of the market

Royalty rates aren't about their physical modems/chips. It's about their standards essential patent licensing. In this regard, it would make sense that how much they charge for these patent licenses should be more in-line with the rest of the industry.

ksec2• 7 years ago

I didn't read the full report yet ( ~300 pages... ) I believe it was unreasonably high without the Rebate.

from the perspective of some major OEMs, more than the rest of the industry combined.

That was referring to Apple, and Qualcomm has shown Apple has some tactics of making its competitor's patents cost look a lot lower, and hence making Qualcomm's patent a lot higher.

My take is that Qualcomm, charges a lot, but unlikely to be "more than the rest of the industry combined".

vatueil• 7 years ago

Sometimes there's no better alternative, but your wariness is well founded. FOSS Patents should definitely be taken with a grain of salt.

FOSS Patents is written by Florian Müller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_Müller_(author)

As some may recall, Müller was frequently criticized back in the day for failing to disclose conflicts of interest in his reporting. Quote from HN user gpm:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18333187

I wouldn't trust FOSS patents and the author Florian Mueller as far as I could throw him. He has a long history of being a paid shill, lying about it, and being flat out wrong.
(Paid by oracle) http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120419070127103
(Paid by microsoft) http://techrights.org/2012/08/18/vile-lobbyist/
(Paid by apple? I can't find other/primary sources to back up this claim though it does seem likely.) https://mrpogson.com/2012/08/21/apples-paid-shillconsultant-...
(More examples of him being wrong) http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120820111527257
Refuting legal arguments takes time and expertise I don't have. He's good at his job, and I have no knowledge about this case. So while I put no faith whatsoever in his analysis I can't tell you how it is wrong, and yes this is an ad hominem.

totalZero2• 7 years ago

This is the right ruling. These guys are the biggest IP bullies out there in tech. Their entire business model depends on it.

wyldfire2• 7 years ago

The big deal from this ruling from AAPL and QCOM's perspective is the terms and scope of the SEP licensing (now must be component-level). Before their recent negotiation, Apple was never even a licensee. These terms have been in place since prior to the first iPhone.

There is, IMO, some validity to the claim that Qualcomm's SEP portfolio enables a significantly different device. Their analogy refers to the ipod and the iphone, whose BOM in some cases differs by only the modem and yet it allows them to charge their customers an enormous markup. Arguably the value-add of that part and the patents it leverages must be a large portion of that markup, so perhaps it's fair to consider the device's cost with respect to the royalty.

AnthonyMouse• 7 years ago

Their analogy refers to the ipod and the iphone, whose BOM in some cases differs by only the modem and yet it allows them to charge their customers an enormous markup. Arguably the value-add of that part and the patents it leverages must be a large portion of that markup, so perhaps it's fair to consider the device's cost with respect to the royalty.

What you're measuring there is the value of the standard and the cellular network as a whole. That includes not only Qualcomm's patents but also everybody else's wireless patents and the entire network infrastructure built by Verizon et al. Which is exactly why standards-essential patents are treated specially.

Moreover, the other obvious problem with it is that there are other devices with exactly the same modem technology in them which vary in price from $50 to $1000 based on processor speed, screen size, operating system, etc. and yet Qualcomm is claiming a percentage of the total device including the value of all the components they had nothing to do with.

umvi3• 7 years ago

"Qualcomm is a law firm with a few engineers"

But seriously, Qualcomm is the worst company ever to work with (except maybe Oracle). They are like a gorilla - they won't budge no matter how hard you push. Every little thing costs licensing money - from documents to tooling. We have a Qualcomm SoC for my current project, and support is abysmal.

They put in a minimal effort to provide support and only after you've completed the onerous requirements to submit a support ticket. It involves retrieving tons of dumps and logs and such using their various Q-tools (which are very buggy and half-baked; many of them cost $25k+/year to license). Most of the time they'll just shrug and say "works on our setup" and refuse to help. We'll spend hundreds of man-hours debugging their crap until we find the issue in their kernel driver and then they won't even acknowledge it was a problem and will say "qmi_wwan is an open source driver. We do not support it." Right, so you expect everyone else to maintain and fix the bugs in qmi_wwan even though virtually ALL of your customers use it and you yourselves rely on it as a critical piece of your development platform. Good one, Qualcomm.

Scoundreller2• 7 years ago

Do you ever point out some terrible design decision and they reply “working as designed” and then do nothing?

tooltalk5• 7 years ago

"Qualcomm is a law firm with a few engineers"

I think you are talking about Rambus, not Qualcomm.

They put in a minimal effort to provide support and only after you've completed the onerous requirements to ...

Don't you have to sign a BCPA or something along that line to get full support? Apple had full access to source code -- which then Apple turned it over to Intel, QCOM alleged -- and also demanded that QCOM update their hardware and drivers at least once a year.

AceJohnny2• 7 years ago

"Qualcomm is a law firm with a few engineers"

I thought Oracle was the premier example of that :)

http://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

But seriously, Qualcomm is the worst company ever to work with (except maybe Oracle).

OK, we're on the same page ;)

not_real_acct• 7 years ago

They put in a minimal effort to provide support and only after you've completed the onerous requirements to submit a support ticket.

Tech jobs in San Diego pay terrible, but Qualcomm is something else. There's a Chili's a block away from Qualcomm, on Mira Mesa Blvd, and I think you could make more money waiting tables there.

No joke, I've had recruiters hit me up for jobs at Qualcomm that paid about 50% more than minimum wage and required a college degree and five years of experience.

fx1994• 7 years ago

Yes, and unfortunately they bought Atheros :(

skunkworker• 7 years ago

So Qualcomm would be forced to have more oversight and accountability that they are playing fair. I’m all for that with a company who has standard essential patents.

simonh• 7 years ago

It also potentially opens up Qualcomm to litigation by licensees that have over-paid.

Of course the Apple law suit is the first thing that springs to mind. Apple alleged harm very much along the lines of that described in this judgement. They probably settled because Intel wasn't able to supply modems for their next Phone and they couldn't wait any longer to cut a deal with Qualcomm without risking their roadmap. However, this judgement might re-open a window for them to sue again.

Traster• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sceptical that Apple would've settled the Qualcomm litigation without some sort of agreement that Apple wouldn't go back and re-litigate later. Even if they did, more litigation would put Apple in a real bind to try and find a new supplier for something Qualcomm now almost has a monopoly on.

tooltalk5• 7 years ago

They probably settled because Intel wasn't able to supply modems for their next Phone

I'm very unconvinced that they settled because of 5G or Intel. Apple plotted the world-wide regulatory attacks, the FTC's lawsuit in the Northern District of California, and the pending class-action lawsuit at least two or three years ago. Further, most wireless carriers won't even launch 5G until much later this year, with national wide coverage starting in late 2020 (most likely later). And Apple couldn't wait a couple of weeks? That doesn't make any sense.

It's most likely Apple knew they had very low chance of winning outside Lucy Koh's court in the Norther District of California. It was no coincidence that the FTC went shopping around for forum in Apple's backyard. They didn't however foresee the gov't shutdown early this year that delayed Koh's decision and now Apple was walking into QCOM's den in the Southern District empty handed. So the choice was fairly clear: wait for Koh's decision which might not arrive on time, then settle, or fight QCOM. The latter option carries a lot of risk since, in addition to most likely adverse outcome, Apple's unsavory, embarrassing legal or supply-practices would be exposed (ie, potential lawsuits from investors).

jokoon• 7 years ago

What's the most powerful foss microcontroller/soc? I guess there are very little incentives to build powerful foss chips, or maybe it's too expensive?

I guess that's due to the tooling used around building the physical chip?

I don't know how much r&d money was spent on the rpi since the chip is proprietary, and if it's doable to spend money to develop a foss soc.

swiley• 7 years ago

FOSS as in the BSP? Freescale’s chips tend to be decent (we’ll see how long that lasts now that Qualcomm owns them.) although I don’t think most of them have modems or GPUs.

I liked TI’s stuff but it’s definitely not meant for anything like a modern smart phone.

If you meant the SOC itself... I haven’t even heard of any outside of some fringe kickstarter things.

klohto• 7 years ago

Qualcomm doesn’t own Freescale. Freescale got bought by NXP and the acquisition by Qualcomm didn’t came through, so it’s still owned by NXP.

By the way, Freescale doesn’t exist anymore and the chips that are still avail. are reaching EOL

blu42• 7 years ago

It's ok, the oval office might eventually back them on the international markets..

gniv• 7 years ago

"Qualcomm Inc. shares fell the most in more than two year"

That's technically correct, but misleading. The stock is still 20% higher than it was on April 15, 2019. (57 then, 69 now).

anthuman• 7 years ago

Fans of volatility must love QCOM. Jumps on the favorable apple ruling a few weeks ago and a few weeks later falls on this ruling.

tooltalk5• 7 years ago

Let's not forget about the Huawei ban, less than a week ago!

You need a ball of steel to trade in this stock.

latte_machiato• 7 years ago

Great. Qualcomm is a law company, not a tech company. We need less of these with power.

thrower123• 7 years ago

I can't think of Qualcomm without remembering when it rocketed insanely high back before the dot com crash. My dad had inherited a tiny bit of money about then and put some of it in the stock market; I got really into watching the business news after school for a while. Unfortunately he left it in a little too long.

sockpuppet999• 7 years ago

Those were heady days. My wife worked there at that time . One day she told me we were millionaires, I blew it off. A few days later she has documentation and it seems that we are MULTI millionaires just thru options she was granted . That was a wonderful windfall. Very unexpected as well. I've followed the company very closely for reasons I stated above and it took a downfall when Irwin stepped down and handed the reins to his son. That's about the time the H1b really started taking off and qcom took advantage of that, wages fell and although I do know some ppl still there writing Java the newcomers did the job cheaper and qcom started to rot from the inside. They always had thier patents on display as anyone who ever walked into the main office will tell you. I don't blame them for using the legal system to enforce thier patents. I'm sure you would have done the same thing although thier hiring a bunch of ppl from overseas really hurt American Engineers, it helped a bunch of American lawyers

Qualcomm Tumbles After Losing U.S. Antitrust Ruling

Related Stories