12/15/2009
SinoCast
SHENZHEN, Dec 15, 2009 (SinoCast Daily Business Beat via COMTEX) — QCOM — Patterning sixteen Chinese partners such as Huawei Technologies and ZTE, Qualcomm staged a partner conference in China on December 4, during which Qualcomm president disclosed that the company derived 23% of its total sales from China last year, adding that with telecom operators there setting in motion the 3G market in full sail, China is likely to be the most important market of Qualcomm globally.
A recent iSuppli report indicates that China’s 3G users are expected to top 100 million by 2013 with China Unicom (SHSE: 600050) and China Telecom (SEHK: 0728, NYSE: CHA) to see significant gains in 3G subscribers.
The 3G technologies adopted by the two carriers, especially China Telecom’s CDMA2000, are both based on Qualcomm’s CDMA.
The avowed goal of the Chinese government is to spend as much as CNY 1 trillion on 3G in the coming three years, according to Zhao Bo, vice governor at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MII).
Chinese telecom carriers’ upcoming, vast investments in 3G have Qualcomm and its peers holding much hope for China. The number of local partners of Qualcomm in the third largest economy has almost doubled since the issue of the 3C licenses.
Qualcomm has leaped to the sixth place this year from the eighth in 2008 in the global semiconductor market. And it has topped the list of the major wireless semiconductor suppliers.
By research firm BDA’s estimations, WCDMA and CDMA EVDO users are likely to make up 40% of the total mobile phone subscribers in the world in five years ahead. And shipment of 3G handsets will outpace that of 2G next year. By 2013, the global 3G handset shipment will hit 1 billion.
The skyrocketing users and fast prevalence of 3G networks will continue weighing on terminal prices. An executive from Qualcomm notes that there will be 3G handsets priced below USD 30 for the emerging markets. On top of that, to further press down the price, Qualcomm is seeking to offer carriers its BREW operating system for free.
To meet the surging demand from users for multimedia, Qualcomm has done a lot of experiments. One of them is to bake several modems into one chip to cover networks of 2G, 3G, and even 4G. It has also been trying to add more functions such as video player and power management directly to 3G chips.
In 1990 Qualcomm began the design of the first CDMA-based cellular base station, based upon calculations derived from the CDMA-based OmniTRACS satellite system.
