81 Facts About Qualcomm

Qualcomm is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, and incorporated in Delaware.

Qualcomm was established in 1985 by Irwin M Jacobs and six other co-founders.

Qualcomm was created in July 1985 by seven former Linkabit employees led by Irwin Jacobs.

Qualcomm grew from eight employees in 1986 to 620 employees in 1991, due to demand for Omnitracs.

Qualcomm was operating at a loss in the 1990s due to its investment in CDMA research.

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Qualcomm had $383 million in annual revenue in 1995 and $814 million by 1996.

Since the base station division was losing $400M a year, profits skyrocketed in the following year, and Qualcomm was the fastest growing stock on the market with a 2, 621 percent growth over one year.

Around this time, Qualcomm established offices in Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America.

Qualcomm announced Steven Mollenkopf would succeed Paul Jacobs as CEO in December 2013.

Mollenkopf said he would expand Qualcomm's focus to wireless technology for cars, wearable devices, and other new markets.

Qualcomm announced its intent to acquire NXP Semiconductors for $47 billion in October 2016.

Qualcomm extended a tender offer to NXP at least 29 times pending Chinese approval, before abandoning the deal in July 2018.

On January 6, 2021, Qualcomm appointed its president and chip division head Cristiano Amon as its new chief executive.

On January 13, 2021, Qualcomm announced it would acquire NUVIA, a server CPU startup founded in early 2019 by ex-Apple and ex-Google architects, for approximately $1.

In March 2022, Qualcomm acquired the advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous driving software brand Arriver from the investment company SSW Partners.

In June 2022, Qualcomm acquired Israeli startup Cellwize through its investment arm Qualcomm Ventures.

Qualcomm indicated that its licenses with Arm cover custom-designed processors.

In mid-1985, Qualcomm was hired by Hughes Aircraft to provide research and testing for a satellite network proposal to the Federal Communications Commission.

Qualcomm further developed the CDMA techniques for commercial use and submitted them to the Cellular Telephone Industries Association in 1989 as an alternative to the time-division multiple access (TDMA) standard for second-generation cell-phone networks.

Qualcomm-supported CDMA standards eventually unseated TDMA as the more popular 2G standard in North America, due to its network capacity.

Qualcomm conducted CDMA test demonstrations in 1989 in San Diego and in 1990 in New York City.

Qualcomm entered the Russian and Latin American markets in 2005.

Qualcomm formed licensing agreements with Nokia in Europe, Nortel in Canada, and with Matsushita and Mitsubishi in Japan.

Qualcomm entered the Chinese market through a partnership with China Unicom in 2000, which launched the first CDMA-based network in China in 2003.

Qualcomm was forced to expand into manufacturing in the 1990s in order to produce the hardware carriers needed to implement CDMA networks that used Qualcomm's intellectual property.

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In 1994, Qualcomm partnered with Northern Telecom and formed a joint partnership with Sony, in order to leverage their manufacturing expertise.

Also, in March 1997, after Qualcomm introduced its Q phone, Motorola initiated a lawsuit for allegedly copying the design of its Startac phone.

In December 1999, Qualcomm sold its manufacturing interests to Kyocera Corporation, a Japanese CDMA manufacturer and Qualcomm licensee.

Qualcomm responded by refusing to license its intellectual property for the standard.

Qualcomm agreed to license its CDMA patents for variants such as WCDMA.

Qualcomm claimed to own 38 percent of WCDMA's essential patents, whereas European GSM interests sponsored a research paper alleging Qualcomm only owned 19 percent.

Qualcomm consolidated its interests in telecommunications carriers, such as Cricket Communications and Pegaso into a holding company, Leap Wireless, in 1998.

Qualcomm initially advocated for the CDMA-based Ultra Mobile Broadband standard for fourth generation wireless networks.

Qualcomm halted development of UMB in 2005 and decided to support the LTE standard, even though it didn't rely as heavily on Qualcomm patents.

Qualcomm became more focused on using its intellectual property to manufacture semiconductors in a fabless manufacturing model.

Qualcomm announced it was developing the Scorpion central processing unit for mobile devices in November 2005.

Qualcomm won a government auction in India in 2010 for $1 billion in spectrum and licenses from which to offer broadband services.

In 2001, Qualcomm introduced Brew, a smartphone app development service with APIs to access contacts, billing, app-stores, or multimedia on the phone.

In 2004, Qualcomm created a MediaFLO subsidiary to bring its FLO specification to market.

Qualcomm built an $800 million MediaFLO network of cell towers to supplement carrier networks with one that is designed for multimedia.

Qualcomm created the FLO Forum standards group with 15 industry participants in July 2005.

Qualcomm rebooted the effort in 2013 with LTE Broadcast, which uses pre-existing cell towers to broadcast select content locally on a dedicated spectrum, such as during major sporting events.

In June 2011, Qualcomm introduced AllJoyn, a wireless standard for communicating between devices like cell phones, televisions, air-conditioners, and refrigerators.

The subsidiary doubled its employee-count by acquiring HealthyCircles Inc, a healthcare IT company, the following May Qualcomm life was later sold to a private equity firm, Francisco Partners, in 2019.

In 2016, Qualcomm developed its first beta processor chip for servers and PCs called "Server Development Platform" and sent samples for testing.

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PC Magazine said the release was "historic" for Qualcomm, because it was a new market segment for the company.

Qualcomm created a Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies subsidiary to focus on the PCs and servers market.

In 2017, Qualcomm introduced embedded technology for 3D cameras intended for augmented reality apps.

Qualcomm is developing and demonstrating laptop processors and other parts, as of 2017.

In 2000, Qualcomm formed a joint venture with Ford called Wingcast, which created telematics equipment for cars, but was unsuccessful and closed down two years later.

Qualcomm acquired the wireless electric car charging company, HaloIPT, in November 2011 and later sold the company to WiTricity in February 2019.

Qualcomm started introducing Snapdragon system-on-chips and Gobi modems and other software or semiconductor products for self-driving cars and modern in-car computers.

In 2020, Qualcomm hired Baidu Veteran, Nan Zhou, to head Qualcomm's push into AI.

In 2017, Qualcomm owned more than 130, 000 current or pending patents.

Since many of Qualcomm's patents are part of an industry standard, the company has agreed to license those patents under "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" terms.

Qualcomm says its patents are more expensive because they are more important and its pricing is within the range of common licensing practices.

In 2005, Broadcom and Qualcomm were unable to reach an agreement on cross-licensing their intellectual property, and Broadcom sued Qualcomm alleging it was breaching ten Broadcom patents.

Qualcomm alleged Broadcom was using litigation as a negotiation tactic and that it would respond with its own lawsuits.

Qualcomm sued Broadcom, alleging it was using seven Qualcomm patents without permission.

In September 2006, a New Jersey court judge ruled that Qualcomm's patent monopoly was an inherent aspect of creating industry standards and that Qualcomm's pricing practices were lawful.

In June 2007, the ITC ruled that Qualcomm had infringed on at least one Broadcom patent and banned corresponding imports.

However, an engineer's testimony led to discovery of 21 JVT-related emails Qualcomm lawyers had withheld from the court, and 200, 000 pages of JVT-related documents.

Qualcomm's lawyers said the evidence was overlooked by accident, whereas the judge said it was gross misconduct.

Qualcomm alleged the six companies were colluding together under the code name Project Stockholm in a legal strategy to negotiate lower rates.

Qualcomm filed a series of patent-infringement lawsuits against Nokia in Europe, Asia, the US, and with the ITC.

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In July 2008, Nokia and Qualcomm reached an out-of-court settlement that ended the dispute and created a 15-year cross-licensing agreement.

The Securities and Exchange Commission started an investigation into whether Qualcomm breached antibribery laws through its activities in China.

In late 2018 Qualcomm paid a settlement to Taiwan for $93 million in fines and a promise to spend $700 million in the local Taiwan economy.

In January 2017, the Federal Trade Commission initiated an investigation into allegations that Qualcomm charged excessive royalties for patents that are "essential to industry standards".

Apple alleged Qualcomm was engaging in unfair competition by selling industry-standard patents at a discount rate in exchange for an exclusivity agreement for its semiconductor products.

Qualcomm filed counter-claims alleging Apple made false and misleading statements to induce regulators to sue Qualcomm.

Qualcomm sued Apple's suppliers for allegedly not paying Qualcomm's patent royalties, after Apple stopped reimbursing them for patent fees.

Qualcomm petitioned the International Trade Commission to prohibit imports of iPhones, on the premise that they contain stolen Qualcomm patents after Apple's suppliers stopped paying.

Qualcomm filed suit against Apple in China for alleged patent infringement in October 2017.

The following month, Apple counter-sued, alleging Qualcomm was using patented Apple technology in its Android components.

In June 2022, Qualcomm announced the company had won its appeal against $1+ billion European Union antitrust fine.

Qualcomm appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which reversed the decision in August 2020.

Qualcomm develops software, semiconductor designs, patented intellectual property, development tools and services, but does not manufacture physical products like phones or infrastructure equipment.

Qualcomm's revenues are derived from licensing fees for use of its intellectual property, sales of semiconductor products that are based on its designs, and from other wireless hardware, software or services.

Qualcomm is a predominantly fabless provider of semiconductor products for wireless communications and data transfer in portable devices.

Qualcomm provides licenses to use its patents, many of which are critical to the CDMA2000, TD-SCDMA and WCDMA wireless standards.