Qualcomm's New CEO

choi

Tiernan Ray, Behind the Scenes in Wireless; How Qualcomm's Steven Mollenkopf keeps the mobile world in motion. Barron's (a WSJ brand), July 12, 2014 (in the column CEO Spotlight).
online.barrons.com/news/articles/SB50001424053111903684104580023862453916060

four consecutive paragraphs:

"Last month, Broadcom (BRCM) said it would exit from the baseband business, opening up a wider opportunity for Qualcomm. Broadcom had 3% of the market at the end of the first quarter.

"Intel's mobile-chip division, meanwhile, lost $3 billion last year, and another $900 million just in the first quarter of this year. Its baseband market share also was halved in the past two years, but the company doesn't lack for confidence. "At the end of the day, there'll be just two mobile-chip vendors," says Intel Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith. 'We'll be one, and you can figure out who the other one is,' he said, an obvious nod to Qualcomm.

"The other big challenger, Taiwan-based MediaTek, is taking the fight to Qualcomm, with plans to open an office in San Diego later this year. The company is already staffed by longtime Qualcomm executives. MediaTek's share of the baseband-chip business has surged to 27% from 22% in 2012.

"MediaTek has grown rapidly by forging strong relations with small phone makers. It doesn't just sell them chips but effectively builds them phones. Mollenkopf contends Qualcomm has now replicated that kind of close collaboration. As a result, he says, 'We are intercepting their growth.'

Note:
(a) Judging from the hard numbers in quotation 2, you may be right to guess Intel is desperate in promoting its chips for mobile devices, something you would not have guessed from reading the preceding posting.
(b) The south German surname Mollenkopf is a “nickname for an obstinate person, related to the Swabian dialect word Molle ‘ox’ + Kopf ‘head.’”
(c) “one of his [Mollenkopf’s] favorite films, The Usual Suspects * * * the film's elusive villain, Keyser Söze”

Keyser Söze
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyser_Söze
(a fictional character in the 1995 film The Usual Suspects; The name was based on one of [screenwriter Christopher] McQuarrie's supervisors, though the last name was changed. McQuarrie settled on Söze after finding it in a Turkish dictionary; it means "to talk too much")

(d) "Qualcomm is the manufacture and sale of $19 billion worth of chips that power much of the world's smartphones. * * * At the same time, Mollenkopf, 45, is constantly looking over his shoulder at would-be rivals, namely MediaTek, the No 2 in mobile chips, and Intel.”

Forbes’ Global 200 Leading Companies:
(i) Qualcomm
www.forbes.com/companies/qualcomm/
(Market Cap $135.46b as of May 2014; sales: $25.47b)
(ii) MediaTek
www.forbes.com/companies/mediatek/
(Market Cap $24.02b as of May 2014; sales: $4.58b)
(iii) So it is no match.

(e) Qualcomm today produces about a third of all the modem, or baseband, chips (used mainly in phones but in other devices, too) sold in the world. That's the biggest share of anyone. It also accounts for an astounding 86% of all high-end baseband chips, dubbed LTE. Under Mollenkopf, who was named head of the chip division in August 2008, Qualcomm also became the top vendor of the industry's other major chip, the CPU, which acts as the brains of a phone, much the way Intel microprocessors are the brains of a PC. Qualcomm has 37% of the market for mobile-device CPUs."
(i) baseband processor
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor

See also baseband
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband
(ii) CPU = central processing unit
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit
("A computer can have more than one CPU; this is called multiprocessing. All modern CPUs are microprocessors, meaning contained on a single chip. Some integrated circuits (ICs) can contain multiple CPUs on a single chip; those ICs are called multi-core processors. An IC containing a CPU can also contain peripheral devices, and other components of a computer system; this is called a system on a chip (SoC)")

(f) "WHEN MOLLENKOPF ARRIVED at Qualcomm in 1994, fresh from earning a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan * * * Mollenkopf, a lacrosse player at Virginia Tech * * * Gabriel Rebeiz, Mollenkopf's thesis advisor at Michigan * * * assigned Mollenkopf a near-impossible thesis project, something usually left to Ph.D.s: to take a camera the size of a pack of cigarettes and fabricate it thumbnail-size. To his professor's astonishment, Mollenkopf succeeded, and the thesis became the basis for a paper that ran in the distinguished journal IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques."

Mollenkopf 's bio in Qualcomm website: "He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech and a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan."

(f) "Mollenkopf has spent much of his Qualcomm career peering into the future, and that's one of his main briefs as CEO. The company's next pivot, in his view, will be to the Internet of Things. He senses big opportunities in wired homes and cars, and wearable technology."

brief (n): "a specific instruction or responsibility <his brief was to strengthen the army>”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brief
(g) "EVEN MORE NAIL-BITING than MediaTek's competitive moves is an investigation launched in November by Chinese regulators into whether Qualcomm charges some smartphone makers an unfairly high royalty rate. The sense of many observers is that China's government has Qualcomm over a barrel. * * * Qualcomm inked a deal two weeks ago to have some of its chips manufactured by China's home-grown chip fabricator, Semiconductor Manufacturing International. Some wonder if that was a sop to the Chinese government, which is eager to build the national technology industry."

Over a Barrel. The Phrase Finder, undated.
www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/over-a-barrel.html