[kappi]

Looking at Q2 is misleading. QTL revenue has increased from 4.591B in 2019 to 6.320B in 2021. https://investor.qualcomm.com/segments/qtl. Qualcomm is heavily represented in lot of industry standards. Every "if condition" is patented and counted as part of any standards. Standards group decisions are highly political and not completely based on technical merits. With Qualcommm political power, they are able to include many of their proposals in standards which end up getting them royalty.

[ljhsiung]

I disagree that it's misleading. Or maybe, yes, it's misleading, but in the opposite way you think-- misleading investors that it's an expanding revenue stream. Shift your view further to FY13. If we're making the claim of a "shakedown over [2] decades" we should look at the past decade.

I use Q2 '22 specifically because it's a recent quarter that's most likely to reflect the vision of the current CEO. Given that my thesis is "current Qualcomm is different", I think it's apropos to talk about current results. And my yearly sampling is based off of the assumption that the general business cycle is periodic YoY (i.e. Q2 2020 is roughly similar in growth rates to Q2 2019, barring anything massive like a pandemic haha lol haha).

Furthermore, I also think it's important to look at breakdowns of % of revenues by division, to see how much a company relies on any specific source.

---- | QTL Rev | QTL EBT | QTL % as non-GAAP Rev

FY13 | $7,554 | $6,590 | 69%

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FY14 | $7,569 | $6,590 | 65%

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FY15 | $7,947 | $6,882 | 74%

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FY16 | $7,664 | $6,528 | 80%

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FY17 | $6,445 | $5,175 | 69%

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FY18 | $5,163 | $3,525 | 64%

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FY19 | $4,591 | $2,954 | 58%

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FY20 | $5,028 | $3,442 | 50%

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FY21 | $6,320 | $4,627 | 34%

The pie was rather small back then, and the licensing slice was HUGE. Nowadays, the exact quantity of licensing revenue is actually just reverting to the mean, and the slice is actually decreasing. You can't go by the growth rates you're given there.

Links to FY13--FY19 here. BTW you can skip every other year, since FYXX tends to report FY(XX-1) as well.

https://investor.qualcomm.com/financial-information/historic...

[tooltalk]

Qualcomm is well represented b/c it's a wireless pioneer who helped define the wireless industry as we know it today. Why do you think SSO's are "highly political"? Do you have any faintest idea how a patent becomes a SEP -- or how royalties are collected? or are you even aware of the fact that Qualcomm who more or less single handledly created the CDMA standard is just a leading patent holder in recent wirelss standard.

I get that there were some aspects of Qualcomm licensing practices weren't quite kosher, but seems there are lot of folks parroting talking points from Apple who orchestrated the original lawsuit along with FTC behind the door. If you want to talk about "political power," we could talk about Apple all day.