Reply to post: Re: Cause for concern

Qualcomm: Arm threatens to end CPU licensing, charge device makers instead

juice

Re: Cause for concern

> But I'd suggest, if they couldn't produce an unequivocal denial straight away, then Qualcomm does have a point.

Good luck finding anyone in the middle of a multi-billion pound lawsuit willing to instantly issue an unequivocal denial. Barring Elon Musk and a recent ex-president of the USA, obviously.

> There seems to be a lot of disparaging of Qualcomm, and of Qualcomm's lawyers in the comments here

It sounds like you're not familiar with Qualcomm, and their historical business model. This may help to explain things:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/IP_18_421

Qualcomm illegally shut out rivals from the market for LTE baseband chipsets for over five years, thereby cementing its market dominance. Qualcomm paid billions of US Dollars to a key customer, Apple, so that it would not buy from rivals. These payments were not just reductions in price – they were made on the condition that Apple would exclusively use Qualcomm's baseband chipsets in all its iPhones and iPads.

This meant that no rival could effectively challenge Qualcomm in this market, no matter how good their products were

Qualcomm has spent decades litigating rivals out of existence and barring or bribing its customers from using other companies technologies. Even Apple - despite Qualcomm's bribes - ended up suing them; the only reason Apple decided to go for a settlement with Qualcomm is that Intel abandoned the sector, leaving Qualcomm as a defacto monopoly with whom Apple had to return to.

In addition, Qualcomm is currently valued at about $133 billion; ARM was valued at $80 billion when Softbank was trying to flog them off to Nvidia, though Bloomberg puts their actual value at arount $25-$35 billion, given their annual revenues of $2.5 billion.

Which means that Qualcomm is around four times as large as ARM, and their lawyers have decades of experience in tangling their opposition up in costly legalise.

Whichever way you cut it, Qualcomm are very much not the underdogs here, and anyone trying to do business with them is well advised to very carefully read any agreements, and to count all of their fingers both before and after meeting them.

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