The United States directly or indirectly cut off Huawei's supply by restricting the upstream and downstream enterprises in the chip industry chain such as TSMC, Qualcomm and ASML.
In the field of mobile CPU and communication technology, Qualcomm has occupied a dominant position for many years.
Qualcomm is a global leader in the research and development of 3G, 4G and 5G technologies. At present, it has provided technical authorization to many manufacturers around the world, involving all brands of telecommunications equipment and consumer electronic equipment around the world. In China, Qualcomm has been doing business for more than 20 years, and the cooperation with China Eco-Partners has been extended to many industries, such as smart phones, integrated circuits, Internet of Things, big data, software, automobiles and so on.
Qualcomm's basic technology provides power for the whole mobile ecosystem, and every 3G, 4G and 5G smartphone has its technology.
At present, the market value of Qualcomm is 1.376 USD, and the income from 20 19 reaches 24.3 billion USD. Qualcomm has global technological advantages in communication technology, CPU architecture and manufacturing technology. Under the technical barriers in Qualcomm, even apples with market value ten times that of Qualcomm have to pay "Qualcomm tax" to Qualcomm.
1) Qualcomm's chip business
Qualcomm's 3, 4 and 5G mobile phone chips have basically eaten more than half of the mobile phone chip market. No matter domestic or foreign mobile phone manufacturers, there are not many choices in the field of mobile phone chips. In addition to Qualcomm, only Samsung and MediaTek are left. In addition, although Apple Huawei's chips have no performance, they are only for personal use and are not for sale.
In terms of performance and communication ability, Qualcomm chip is the most advantageous, which leads mobile phone manufacturers to invest in Qualcomm camp. In 20 19, the global market share of mobile phone chips in Qualcomm was one third, while in 20 18, the global market share of mobile phone chips in Qualcomm was even close to half.
2) Patent authorization in Qualcomm.
Since the early days of Qualcomm's establishment, it has gradually accumulated a large number of technologies in the patent standard of mobile communication from 2G to 5G.
Among 3G and 4G core patents, Qualcomm's contribution patents rank first in the world. More crucially, Qualcomm's patents in 2, 3 and 4G standards are the most critical and lowest-level parts, such as CDMA in 3G and OFDM in 4G. In other words, as long as your product is connected to the 234G network, you can't bypass the technical scope of Qualcomm.
Elvin Jacobs, the founder of Qualcomm, is a top expert in the field of communication. He is a former Ph.D. student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-author of Fundamentals of Communication Engineering, with strong strength.
Qualcomm was founded when Jacob was 52 years old. 1985, Jacob retired from Linkabit, which he founded, and should have begun to enjoy his old age. However, experts can't bear loneliness. After resting for three months, Jacob and six old colleagues (all communication experts) reached an agreement and decided to continue their business.
In the early days of Qualcomm, there were no products, no business model and even insufficient funds. But they are all good at digital and wireless communication, so they decided to make a difference in this field.
Qualcomm means high-quality communication, so it was established. This choice has made them the dominant players in the communication field in the future.
Qualcomm's first job was a satellite mobile communication program. On the technical issue, we adopted ——CDMA, a military communication technology during the Cold War. This well-known technology will dominate 3G for many years to come.
At that time, the mainstream technology was TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access). But with a deep understanding of communication technology, Jacob believes that CDMA, which originated from' frequency hopping' technology, can increase the network capacity by 40 times and greatly reduce the network cost.
But at that time, CDMA technology was not mature, which meant that the development cost was high and the time was long, which was not as good as TDMA. In the case that the industry is generally not optimistic, the elderly choose to focus on CDMA technology and invest a lot of manpower and funds in research and development and promotion.
1989, the first CDMA drill. That spring, Qualcomm also reached an agreement with San Francisco Pacific Telephone Company to demonstrate CDMA technology. At the end of the agreed period, Qualcomm's technical team is still carrying out the final debugging. With their hard work day and night, Elvin Jacob finally received the "thumb" from the engineer, and it was this agreement that got them a million-dollar contract. 1993, Gao Daotong proved that CDMA can provide TCP/IP protocol services, making him an early promoter of mobile phone network.
CDMA is very successful, which can provide better call quality and greatly reduce operating costs. Therefore, the operator was transferred. 1993, CDMA was adopted by American Telecommunications Industry Association to locate the industry standard. 1995, CDMA was commercialized in Hong Kong. 1996 landed in Korea and began to spread all over the world.
CDMA has become the basic technology for the development of Qualcomm.
After the CDMA technology was proved, in order to better promote the industrial development of Qualcomm, in the early days, Qualcomm had authorized the CDMA technology to terminal manufacturers and charged them patent fees, and Qualcomm became one of the top players in the industrial chain pyramid.
1999, the international telecommunication union chose CDMA as the basic technology of 3G. It has established Qualcomm's leading position in 3G communication field in the future.
In 3G era, WCDMA, CDMA2000 and TD-SCDMA are all developed based on CDMA technology. Because Qualcomm has been developing CDMA technology for a long time, it has a large number of patent standard-setting rights. The 3G era can be said to be the era of Qualcomm.
In order to popularize CDMA technology, Qualcomm also made mobile phone business and communication equipment in the early days, thus embedding CDMA technology into hardware. By 1999, the hardware business had accounted for 60% of Qualcomm's revenue, but Jacob decided to cut the hardware business.
This is to avoid competition with other hardware companies, which is more conducive to the promotion of their own technology. On the other hand, Qualcomm is more focused on technology research and development, licensing and chip business.
The so-called third-rate companies make products, second-rate companies make brands, and first-class companies make standards. Qualcomm's practice of cutting hardware products has brought it closer to "first-class" companies.
With the advantages of CDMA technology, Qualcomm has written CDMA into baseband chips and integrated baseband SOC processors, and Qualcomm has become the largest IC design company in the world.
SOC includes CPU, GPU, ISP, modem and other core components. Qualcomm has systematic advantages in these technologies. Baseband chip is a digital chip for transmitting and receiving data by radio, and it is the core of communication equipment. Without baseband chips, mobile phones can't make calls and surf the Internet with mobile data. Therefore, every mobile communication device has a baseband chip. The powerful Apple A series chips also use Qualcomm's baseband chip technology. Therefore, the terminal equipment of major manufacturers can never avoid Qualcomm.
In 2000, Qualcomm integrated GPS into its own multimedia CDMA chip and system software, that is, integrated the mainstream functions such as GPS, Internet, MP3 and Bluetooth. Subsequently, the processing capacity of Qualcomm chip was greatly improved, and the power management was also improved.
By 2007, Qualcomm has become the world's leading supplier of mobile chips.
Qualcomm has formed three major revenue sources based on communication patent authorization, mobile phone baseband chip and finished mobile phone chip business.
In the past 30 years, Qualcomm has invested more than $44 billion in R&D, and applied for and owned more than130,000 patents worldwide. These technologies focus on cellular communication, including standard basic patents and non-basic patents. Among them, the standard basic patent refers to the technical standard that is very important to the equipment.
Qualcomm's patent charging model is also unique.
For general patents, the patent fee is calculated according to the part involving the use of the patent. However, Qualcomm is calculated according to the total value of the whole product, that is, screen, camera, memory chip and other accessories unrelated to Qualcomm patents are also included in the calculation proportion, generally accounting for 4-5%.
For example, if a mobile phone costs $65,438+000, Qualcomm will pay a patent fee of about $5.
This is why Qualcomm is called a "rogue", but he is helpless, because the necessary technology cannot be separated from Qualcomm.
Qualcomm's mobile phone chip business has become the first in the world. Most mobile phone manufacturers are vying for the first place in Qualcomm chip to gain the first-Mover advantage. If Qualcomm reduces its supply to anyone, it may face the risk of losing its market or even going bankrupt. Qualcomm has a strong voice in high-end chips.
Due to the accumulation of 2G technology, Qualcomm is divided into two parts with GSM. Qualcomm, which stands out in the 3G era and has unlimited scenery, has made "the world suffer from Qualcomm for a long time". In 4G, the industry abandoned CDMA technology and chose OFDMA as the core technology of 4G. But 4G is still inseparable from Qualcomm's technology accumulation for many years.
Although it can't completely get rid of Qualcomm's technical control, it at least reduces Qualcomm's right to speak. In 20 14 years, the United States ranked first with 16 1, and Chinese mainland ranked second with 1247. In the 5G era, enterprises represented by Huawei, ZTE and Datang Communications achieved the first total number of patents. However, in terms of coding scheme, Qualcomm still obtains most of the schemes, which means that Qualcomm still has advantages in standard formulation, while China has advantages in implementation scheme.
To sum up, due to Qualcomm's first-Mover advantage, Qualcomm can "collect money lying down" because of its technology accumulation in 2, 3 and 4 G, but with the competition of enterprises from all over the world on the technology track, Qualcomm's advantage in communication technology is becoming less and less obvious. On the contrary, China's investment in 5G has finally paid off, and we will master more core technologies in the future.
In the mobile phone CPU business, Qualcomm's position is still unshakable. Both Huawei and MediaTek have developed their own 5G baseband and chips, but Huawei's chip business is in jeopardy due to sanctions. MediaTek is one of the few companies that can pose a threat to Qualcomm's chips. The performance gap between MediaTek's Tianji 1 1000+ and Snapdragon's 865(5G) has narrowed and made great progress. But the actual use needs more feedback from the market. On the opportunity of 5G, MediaTek has not fallen behind for the time being, but whether he can seize the opportunity like AMD and continue to exert his strength depends on his performance behind him. Diversified competition in the market is also beneficial to consumers.