| There are 5 or more independent modem developers in China. If you add to that that 5G was mostly a Chinese thing, I can confidently say that at least in 5G space, Qualcomm is nowhere near a monopolist now. Qualcomm is pretty much an Intel of modem world. Their stuff is quite good, but their commercial terms are beyond a robbery, and you simply don't play in this space if you are a <100m company according to them. Modems are no rocket science, and QCM made itself the juiciest target for Chinese. If people have good memory here, at around 2012 Chinese company called Allwinner was steamrolling Qualcomm in its home field - application processors for mobile electronics. Allwinner's only weak side was poor 3G integration, and they were about to finally solve it with their "phablet" solution with single package ram+soc+3rd party baseband combo. Then, something strange happened: every mention of Phablet vanished from their website, and a month later they announced some vaguely termed "deal" with Qualcomm, after which a lot of their senior managers quit the company and left China for fancy life in the West... There is a speculation in Shenzhen that they were basically bought off by Qualcomm. Now with 5+ more contenders, I doubt they will be able to buy off all of them, especially when Huawei is involved. |
I imagine the Chinese government also has an interest in not allowing the expertise to leave the country