Rebirth of the internet boss

Chapter 481 The Qualcomm tax that can never be separated (4000 words! Please subscribe!)
Don't look at the Android Alliance from 3 to 7, and then suddenly increased to 14, but Li Feng also understands that in addition to Google and HTC, these later companies will only be "icing on the cake".
Once the Android Alliance fails, that is, when the fish collapse and the birds fall apart, the strength of the Android Alliance will ultimately depend on itself.

What's more, most of these companies that joined later are telecom operators. Except for the US telecom operator Sprint, which is urgently needed, the others are of no use to the entire alliance, at least not now.
There is no mobile phone manufacturer that Li Feng needs most, but at least there are two good news of "Motorola and LG", at least we can sit down and talk.

However, the main purpose of Li Feng's visit to the United States this time is not a telecom operator, nor a mobile phone manufacturer, neither of which. The reason why Li Feng made the trip in person is for this reason: Qualcomm!
According to Li Feng's division of the entire mobile phone field: mobile phone manufacturers, such as Motorola and LG; mobile device providers, such as Huawei and Ericsson;

Telecom operators, such as China Mobile and China Unicom; semiconductor manufacturers, such as Intel and MediaTek; application software providers, such as Google, Yahoo, etc.
And Qualcomm is definitely the most special one, even calling it a "solution provider for the entire smartphone". It has chips and baseband communication protocols. smart phone,
As Teacher Luo said, "Except for Samsung and Apple, all smartphone manufacturers are solution integrators (Huawei mobile phones were not so powerful at the time)!" Integrate into a mobile phone, and then sell it to the seller.

And Qualcomm is just the top player in the entire smartphone industry chain. It has a full set of mobile communication protocols, and its Xiaolong chip is the standard configuration of flagship mobile phones, and even Apple's baseband chip is Qualcomm's (there are many mobile phone chips. types, the most critical processor chips and baseband chips), so there are still many mobile phone manufacturers vying for the right to launch the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 series chips.

Of course, the smart phone market has not yet exploded, and the real first smart phone "Apple's first-generation iPhone" has not yet been launched, but for the future of the Android Alliance, Qualcomm must be brought in now.

Who is missing in this Android alliance, and Qualcomm cannot be missing!
So the second day after Li Feng arrived in the United States, he didn't even go to his own company, and he didn't even have a date with his own woman, so he took Larry Page and Long Xiaotian to visit Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs. .

Paul Jacob is the son of Qualcomm founder Alvin Jacob, and he can be regarded as inheriting his father's business. However, in the technology circle at that time, inheriting his father's business was not a promising option.

The lesson from the past is the resignation of Motorola CEO Christopher Galvin two years ago. When he was in office, Motorola was once called the "Galvin Dynasty" and was a typical family business.

As the third-generation head of the family, after Christoph came to power in 1997, in just six years, Motorola quickly experienced a sharp drop in the mobile phone market share, half of the stock price, prosperity and decline, and Christopher was forced to resign .

Therefore, on the day Paul Jacobs took over as Qualcomm CEO, the company's stock price fell by 3%, not to mention that the founder of Qualcomm, Alvin Jacobs, is also a legendary entrepreneur.

Alvin Jacob founded Qualcomm after he left his university professorship at the age of 51, and with his advanced technical vision, he created a CDMA empire with a complete set of core technologies in the following 20 years.

CDMA is a wireless standard, and Qualcomm is the first commercial and pusher of this technology.As early as 1986, Qualcomm obtained the first patent in the CDMA field. Compared with the 3G era (2007) when the standard was thoroughly popularized, this time is surprisingly early.

For example, the names of WCDMA, CDMA2000, and TD-SCDMA represent different network technologies, but they all contain the word CDMA, and Qualcomm is the owner of the CDMA technology patent.
The current 3G\4G wireless communication is based on CDMA technology. Qualcomm has a large number of core standard essential patents in the global communication field, so it can charge patent fees from all manufacturers using this technology, and it is not limited to mobile phone manufacturers and operators. .

At this time, the 3G era has not really come yet, but Qualcomm at this time can also be regarded as a world-class giant, which undoubtedly makes its fans more demanding on its successors.

In fact, Paul Jacobs did not really inherit his father's career. He got the position of Qualcomm CEO by his own ability.

Paul Jacobs once clarified to his doubters that Qualcomm is not a family business, "It is the board's choice for me to be CEO, not my father's choice."

According to his narrative, three years before Alvin Jacobs left, Qualcomm had already started preparations for a new successor. After locking in multiple candidates inside and outside, it finally selected Paul Jacobs.

Such a statement is actually traceable-at that time, the Jacobs family held less than 3% of Qualcomm shares and voting rights.

Still, when 42-year-old Paul Jacobs took over as Qualcomm's CEO in 2005, he was still facing many crises.

In the old Jacob era, 3G was in the ascendant, and in the communication market, the GSM standard (2G mode) occupied the mainstream of the market.

Qualcomm played the role of a "challenger". Through competition with other technical standards and promotion to all aspects of the industry, it took more than ten years to prove that CDMA represents the future, trying to replace GSM, and challenging the dominant position of Intel in mobile chips .

These challenges were largely successfully completed before Paul Jacobs took over.

The next role of the challenger is often the monopoly.

For a long time, Qualcomm's core business model has been to issue CDMA patent licenses to global telecom equipment manufacturers and charge patent fees.

In the 2G era, standards such as GSM and CDMA competed for the market, but with the popularization of 3G, CDMA has become the unified foundation of various 3G networks, which means that all telecom operators using 3G need to pay Qualcomm for this patent. cost.

Someone once thought that compared with the old Jacob, Paul Jacob might be better at patent fees.Paul Jacobs looks thinner and gentler than his father, and he smiles when he speaks. In some external activities, he will take out several different CDMA mobile phones from his briefcase and introduce them, just like a competent salesman member.

But this may be a misunderstanding. In fact, Paul Jacob's toughness has been reflected since the beginning of his tenure.

"No one likes to pay patent fees, people like cheap things," he explained to the media two months after taking over, "but people didn't consider where Qualcomm invested these patent fees, which is Qualcomm's basic technology Only by researching and lowering the threshold of the industry can the price of mobile phones drop significantly.”

In response to those who questioned Qualcomm's "lawyers more than R&D personnel", Paul Jacob's statement was more direct-Qualcomm has funds to pay lawyers, so "will continue to fight back, opponents have not got what they want at all thing".

And Paul Jacobs’ toughness has set the tone for Qualcomm’s industry attitude for more than ten years. When he took office, he started a three-year dispute with Nokia. The lawsuit lasted from 2005 to 2007. And on the day Li Feng visited, the lawsuit was still going on!
Also because of the stalemate in the negotiations, Nokia announced that it would buy chips from Broadcom, STMicroelectronics and Infineon, which means giving up on Qualcomm chips.

In the eyes of many analysts at the time, this result had a greater negative impact on Qualcomm.

Because Nokia was not only the absolute leader in the mobile phone industry at that time, but also continued to expand its market share, reaching 2007% of global mobile phone shipments in 49.

So far, this is a ratio that no one can match. It is really an achievement of "unprecedented and never-before-seen". Even the current combination of Apple and Samsung cannot achieve it.

Therefore, some people even think that this will affect the development speed of 3G.

But everyone ignored the changes in the outside world.

In the future, when people look back on this year, they have clearly realized that for the entire communication industry, including mobile phone manufacturers, operators, chips, wireless companies, etc., 2007 is called the first year of smartphones and the year of mobile Internet. In the first year, this means the arrival of a new era, and this era is still continuing today.

Because the first-generation iPhone was about to be released that year, which not only subverted the entire mobile phone industry, but also changed a long-standing phenomenon in the wireless communication industry: 3G networks have lacked innovation motivation after 7 or 8 years of development. Practitioners believe that since 2G is enough for calls and text messages, why do we need faster Internet speeds?
Apple founder Jobs then used the "App Store" to answer this question. With the popularity of the iPhone, the 3G network that needs to wait for 2 minutes to open the App has been accelerated.

And Qualcomm, which pushes the 3G network, is undoubtedly the biggest beneficiary, and it almost "wins" the entire industry.

"There is no doubt that a very positive impact of the iPhone is to make the mainstream people want to use the device to get more data," Paul Jacobs said in an interview, "Qualcomm has spent a lot of money to promote 3G, but all Nothing like the iPhone effect".

Of course, in addition to "lying to win" on the industry standard, Qualcomm has also done a far-reaching thing-launching a Snapdragon chip brand.

And 5 years later, when the brand wanted to promote it in China, Qualcomm chose the name "Snapdragon" from 100 alternatives collected.

The combination of communication patents and chips allowed Qualcomm to fully demonstrate its advantages. In the end, Qualcomm became the "father" of all smartphone manufacturers, "the Qualcomm tax that can never be separated."

Few people like Qualcomm's patent fees.

But it turns out that in the 3G era, no one, whether it is an operator or an equipment manufacturer, can bypass this fee. It is called the "Qualcomm tax".

And as always, Qualcomm's charging method for mobile phone chips is quite "tough", agreeing to 3% to 5% of the sales of mobile phones.

Look clearly, this is the sales price of the whole phone, not the ex-factory price or cost price. From the perspective of mobile phone manufacturers, this is unreasonable!

Take the current Apple mobile phone as an example. The iPhone 1000 mobile phone worth 8 US dollars can sell almost 5 million units. If it is calculated at 50%, then Apple’s patent fee to Qualcomm is [-] billion US dollars.
In other words, Qualcomm can hold 50 billion US dollars for nothing without doing anything. Of course, because of the specific agreements and tax standards involved, the specific amount cannot be calculated, but Apple's financial report is more than one billion US dollars. There are still.

And look more clearly, this is the sales price of the whole machine, including chips, monitors, cameras, etc.
For example, if a mobile phone using Qualcomm chips sells for $100, Qualcomm needs to pay $5; if the phone adds components such as lenses or memory to increase the price to $150, even if the new components It has nothing to do with the chip, but the fee paid to Qualcomm has increased to $7.5.

You know, although the chips on smartphones have the highest technical content, the most valuable things on mobile phones are display panels, camera modules, functional devices, structural parts, etc., especially display panels are the most expensive components, damn it It has something to do with your chip!
And Qualcomm is so domineering, it’s all 5%, you can’t buy it at a loss, you can’t buy it, and you can’t be fooled. Our slogan is: no middleman to make the difference!
There will definitely be people who will try to resist, but in the end they were all beaten down by Qualcomm.

For example, in the Chinese market, Meizu, which has always been a maverick, tried to avoid Qualcomm and use chips from Samsung and MediaTek instead. , I have to pay Qualcomm to me!
Some people may ask: Why do I have to pay you Qualcomm for using MediaTek chips!
Qualcomm: Because I, Qualcomm, own the necessary standard patents for 3G\4G wireless communication, that is to say, as long as your mobile phone is a smartphone that supports 3G\4G, you have to pay me Qualcomm!
Without Qualcomm, you would not be able to access the Internet, meet girls, read novels, and pay some fees to be self-sufficient.

Q: What if I am a 2G Nokia 1100?
Qualcomm: …Uh, well, you are awesome, you don’t need to pay for this, then you will always live in a primitive society.

……

Now that he knows that Qualcomm will be so powerful in the future, it is simply "to order the world, and no one dares not to obey", then Li Feng's visit this time, in addition to bringing Qualcomm into the Android lineup, another purpose is to obtain Qualcomm's patent authorization, not only to clear the The biggest shortcoming of the Android system also lays the foundation for Fengrui's future mobile communication development.

PS: This chapter is a bit watery, please forgive me!The main reason is that I think about the follow-up plot and make it more reasonable. Although online novels need to be more exciting and YY, the biggest feature of my novel is that it is based on reality and is more reasonable, so there are more things to consider, but you can also read it. Thanks to my efforts, many stories and plots happened in reality!Finally, please continue to support me and subscribe!

(End of this chapter)