Qualcomm Q1 income up 46 per cent

Wireless technology company Qualcomm reported its first quarter figures yesterday, revealing net income up 46 per cent on the back of strong sales of mobile handset chips. However, the company disappointed Wall Street analysts by predicting that Q2 earnings would fall short of the average forecasts, blaming lower demand from China, India and South Korea.~ ~ Revenues for the quarter were $1.4 billion, up 15 per cent year-on-year. Net income was $513 million, up 46 per cent year-on-year.~ ~ "The deployment and expansion of third generation CDMA networks and devices continues to drive our results," said Irwin Jacobs, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm. "WCDMA contributed 32 per cent to our royalty revenues from September quarter shipments, demonstrating further expansion of WCDMA networks and increasing device sales."~ ~ The downloading of applications and content to wireless phones has grown strongly, reports Qualcomm, providing incremental revenue growth to 3G operators. "By November of 2003, there had been more than 60 million downloads of BREW applications since the first BREW operator launched services in November of 2001," said Jacobs.

"By November of 2004, over 200 million downloads of applications had occurred using the BREW system. BREW is now offered by 37 operators in 24 countries under various service brand names and the BREW developer community is thriving."~ ~ Research and development expenses totaled $228 million in quarter, up 52 per cent as the company focuses development of integrated circuit products and initiatives to support multimedia applications, high-speed wireless Internet access and multimode, multiband, multinetwork products.~ ~ "The wireless market is changing rapidly and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future," said Jocobs. "The mobile phone is becoming the essential consumer device and our strategy of comprehensive feature integration in our Mobile Station Modem digital chipset is enabling convergence of a broad array of consumer functions within the ubiquitous phone. In a complementary cycle, the BREW platform supports the availability of compelling applications in the marketplace to take advantage of these advanced features."~ ~ Qualcomm anticipates shipments of approximately 168 million CDMA2000 units and 55 million WCDMA units for the 2005 fiscal year. It also expects average selling prices for CDMA phones, CDMA2000 and WCDMA combined, to increase 5 per cent to approximately $215 per unit.~ ~