About Steven Mollenkopf
In 2018, Mollenkopf expressed disappointment over the termination of Qualcomm's deal to acquire NXP Semiconductors, but noted that the company had grown its non-mobile revenue to $5 billion, a 70% increase since the deal was signed. He stated that Qualcomm did not see a change in China's posture toward the company despite the deal's failure, and described the business environment there as "very friendly" and "very constructive."
Throughout 2019 and 2020, Mollenkopf described 5G as a fundamental technology change comparable to electricity or water, and cited an IHS study estimating it would generate $13.2 trillion in economic value by 2035. He said that 5G would disrupt industries including healthcare, energy, retail, and manufacturing. Mollenkopf also stated that he did not expect a separation of international 5G standards, saying it was not in the interest of companies like Qualcomm and Huawei to create such a divide. He characterized Qualcomm as the world's leading wireless technology innovator, citing $61 billion in R&D investment over 35 years.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Steven Mollenkopf's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Host0:00
Joining us now in a CNBC exclusive is Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf, and as well we're joined by John Ford, of course, who covers the company closely. Steve, good to have you back. Nice to see you. And congrats. Well, forget that. I don't like to do that actually. It was a good quarter. It was a good quarter. It was a strong quarter, and guidance is also quite strong. When you look at and try to model out, and you're talking about what, 500 million units reaching 500 million units, 150% year-over-year increase in smartphones in calendar 2021. What gives you the confidence in that forecast?
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Steven Mollenkopf0:37
Well, that's just the 5G portion as well, so 5G handsets grow by 150% year-over-year. I'll tell you what gives us confidence. If you look this year, and I think we talked about this a bit earlier in the year, the real question was how would the market react to the COVID pandemic? And obviously a couple of quarters ago there was a lot of concern about how different industries would react. What's happened in the handset industry is it's probably come back a little stronger than people expected. One of the reasons that we had such a good print this quarter was because the handset market in total was a little stronger than we thought. We thought it might be down impacted about 15% due to COVID, but it ended up being about 5% now. We've used that as an assumption moving forward, and so we have a lot of confidence actually in our 5G forecast and the handset forecast overall. I think our visibility into the way that the market is performing even in this pandemic environment has increased over the last several years.
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Host1:38
You know, Steve, there was a great deal of attention of course when Apple launched its 5G phone a few weeks ago, but there were also plenty of reviewers who point out and others who point out, hey, if you really want to get that kind of functionality that will come along with it, you've got to be basically standing at the tower. It's going to be a while until all those things that seem to be promised in terms of getting that 5G phone in your hand are actually going to be delivered. Does that in some way put the brakes on sort of a wider scale adoption?
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Steven Mollenkopf2:08
No, not at all. In fact, if you look at a couple of things that I think are notable, one is the 4G rollout versus the 5G rollout. The 5G rollout is actually faster if you just look at number of networks launching in the first year, year and a half, two years of the launch. If you look at the degree to which the new technology is existing in the portfolios of handset manufacturers and how deep they go in terms of the price tiers, and then the other thing that I think is really important is that the handset market is actually already made the switch to that technology even before you start to see the deployment. So when we look at it with, I guess, the eyes of seeing many of these transitions, we're quite pleased with the way the 5G rollout is occurring.
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Host2:57
Shepard Smith here. Thanks for watching CNBC on YouTube.
