Hi all,

Time flies and it is getting closer and closer to 9^th April, the date which patent between Nokia and Qualcomm is going to expire.

People always say, if there is no agreement, Nokia cannot produce anymore WCDMA phone while Qualcomm has to take out GSM part of its chip. That dragged Qualcomm from last year high to a 20% discounted price.

I have been reading news for both companies for some years, and Qualcomm was the very very first Nasdaq investment I made. Its MediaFlo, no matter appealing or not did give a good feedback in 3GSM. Of course after last few weeks of price revision, it needs another wave of news to light up the high hopes again. When I was anticipating a silence day on 9^th April, Qualcomm has surprisingly settled another serious lawsuit with Broadcom. Whew~! Seems dead-locks could be opened and indeed Qualcomm has already allocated more money this year to settle those big and small court disputes. As cheap phones normally use chips from TI and Freescales, the multimedia chips from Qualcomm actually increased their profit margin. After the 9^th April, another big day for them this year is probably the launch of MediaFlo in US, I’ll see…

Nokia has finally followed the path of other network giants, consolidation. The new Nokia Siemens which will be running from 1^st April has strengthened the low profit network business on Nokia side. Ericsson, bought Marconi last year, has already signed up many deals to build 3G or 3.5G networks with cheaper and cheaper price around the world. The battle field of the year is the 3G contract from China Mobile… Consider in China, the 4 big guys of Telecom Networks have partners with foreign companies, Siemens (華為), Nokia (普天), Ericsson (中興), and Alcatel (大唐), the deal between Nokia and Siemens has raised the possibility of winning the project from China Mobile. News below narrate better about the relations for those partners and giants, seems Huawei is at a weaker side of the Nokia Siemens deal but it is good for 普天.

http://big5.chinataiwan.org/web/webportal/W5267202/Uhuss/A442983.html

http://big5.ce.cn/cysc/communications/3gxf/200703/03/t20070303_10566129.shtml

Lucent Alcatel still have lots of problems to shrug off after their merge last year. Even promising however to bid this project seems a bit difficult.

Would Qualcomm and Nokia become this year winners? I am reading to see any hint to support my prediction. However, as I don’t expect there is any drama on 9^th April, which means after that day, Nokia would still pay the patent fee at least until the end of this year. The more lawsuit cases are settled by Qualcomm this year, the more promising the long-term development of the company becomes.

Eric