Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf must have been born with a bullseye on his back.
During his seven-year tenure, activist hedge fund JANA Partners demanded that he break up the company; antitrust authorities on three continents investigated and sued the company; leading customer Apple defected to rival chipmaker Intel and also sued Qualcomm; tech acquirer and Broadcom CEO Hock Tan initiated a hostile takeover of the company; the prior CEO tried to take the company private; and China blocked Qualcomm’s bid to buy NXP Semiconductors.
Through it all, Mollenkopf persevered and sought to wall off those “external stimuluses,” as he described them at Brainstorm Tech in 2019, from the bulk of the company’s engineers, scientists, and marketers. “They’re a distraction to me and about 10 other people,” he told me on the conference stage.
So maybe it’s no surprise that having finally conquered all of Qualcomm’s demons and seen the company’s stock reach record heights a few weeks ago, Mollenkopf is calling it quits. As Robert noted in yesterday’s newsletter, Mollenkopf announced on Tuesday that he’ll retire in June and hand the reins to his top lieutenant, company president Cristiano Amon. “The mistake is to go too long,” Mollenkopf told CNBC yesterday, saying the company will be in “very, very capable hands.”
Wall Street has confidence too. Qualcomm’s stock climbed 3% on Tuesday after the CEO transition announcement and is up 75% over the past year.
That’s partly because while Mollenkopf was fighting off the many outside challenges, Amon has been leading the charge inside the company to take the industry lead in 5G, the next generation of wireless technology.
The two men are about the same age (Mollenkopf at 52 is two years senior to Amon), have similar engineering backgrounds, and have both been with the company for decades. Amon was the “natural choice,” Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon noted yesterday, and is not expected to make major changes at Qualcomm.
Still, taking over at the top comes with its own challenges. Analysts expect Amon to expand Qualcomm’s 5G technology rapidly beyond phones into cars, drones, and all kinds of Internet-connected gear, but U.S. Wireless carriers are lagging in deploying 5G. And though Mollenkopf won back Apple’s business, the iPhone maker is developing its own competing technology and could defect again. Looming deep in the background is Nvidia, now the most valuable U.S. Chipmaker. Nvidia has been an also-ran in mobile chips but its pending $40 billion acquisition of Arm will transform it into a major player overnight if and when the deal closes.
It should provide plenty of action for Amon and Qualcomm for the next seven years.
Aaron Pressman
@ampressman
[email protected]
NEWSWORTHY
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Look at those hands, are they small hands? The iPhone 12 Mini drew a lot of praise from reviewers, but the smallest entry in Apple's 2020 lineup is seeing the lightest sales as well. Only about 6% of iPhone buyers opted for the mini model, while its big brother, the basic iPhone 12, drew 27% of purchasers, according to a survey by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.
1660 Pennsylvania Applications. The incoming Biden administration said former Facebook engineering director David Recordon will lead technology at the Office of Management and Administration. He served as the first director of White House information technology under President Obama. In other personnel moves, IBM said former Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn joined its board of directors as vice chairman and advisor to CEO Arvind Krishna. And the Keller has landed, chip design ace Jim Keller that is. Following his surprise departure from Intel last year, Keller is now president and chief technology officer at A.I. Chip startup Tenstorrent, Anandtech reports.
Don't rain on my parade. Just because bitcoin has skyrocketed to almost $35,000 in the blink of an eye doesn't mean it can't go higher, at least according to the investment gurus at JPMorgan Chase. The bank's strategists said bitcoin could reach $146,000 over the long term. As I mentioned to Robert yesterday, the Pressman family's token investment in cryptocurrencies via PayPal has now more than doubled. A couple more moves like that and it won't be so token anymore.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Spy satellites secretly snapped almost 1 million pictures of the planet in the late 20th century. Pictures from Project Corona, grainy shots to modern eyes, have since been declassified and are coming in handy for ecological analysis, Marion Renault reports for the New York Times.
Even though they’re static, the panoramic photos contain discernible imprints — penguin colonies in Antarctica, termite mounds in Africa and cattle grazing trails in Central Asia — that reveal the dynamic lives of earthly inhabitants below. “It’s Google Earth in black and white,” said Catalina Munteanu, a biogeographer at Humboldt University of Berlin who has used Corona images to show that marmots returned to the same burrows throughout decades of destructive agricultural practices in Kazakhstan.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
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BEFORE YOU GO
It's definitely not for everyone, but Netflix's latest smash Bridgerton is setting records. The Gossip Girl- meets-Jane Austen mashup was watched in 63 million homes in its first month of release, Netflix says, making it the streaming giant's fifth most popular series ever. In this household, the show got mostly rave reviews from all ages, although mom and dad found the sex scenes a bit too graphic. As the fictional narrator Lady Whistledown might say, the social season is upon us.
