| The Emergence of the Large Cap Paradigm [Part 4]  Dear Daily Prophecy Reader,
This four-part series has come to an end, with George joining Richard and Steve for the finale. You can catch up on the series if you missed any. Here is part 1, part 2, and part 3. Now for the last instalment. Keep scrolling…
There is no more powerful example of our emerging large cap paradigm than the continued and growing dominance of Qualcomm in wireless technology. It’s been more than 20 years since the complete triumph of Qualcomm’s spread spectrum, bandwidth-sharing CDMA (code division multiple access) as the way to send information wirelessly, whether voice or data. By using all the available spectrum all the time, CDMA trounced rival, static “time division” systems that everyone had inherited from wireline systems. TDMA’s fatal flaw in wireless was to leave most of the wireless time slots empty most of the time, like empty railroad cars in the air. Beyond CDMA, it’s been 15 years since — via purchase of co-founder Andy Viterbi’s Flarion corporation — Qualcomm began to disrupt its own CDMA approach with an even more demanding OFDMA (orthogonal frequency division multiple access) system. OFDMA breaks the spectrum into Fourier Transforms that find and distill multiple pure frequency carriers amid any complex waveform. Though not a Qualcomm invention like CDMA, Qualcomm came to own and master it, and OFDMA would triumph even more completely than CDMA. And yet, the company is further ahead of all rivals than it has ever been, its reach broader, its claims to uniquely powerful intellectual property deeper. Plus, we think the stock — up more than 6,000% from its January 1998 price ($10,000 invested in 1998 would be more than $600,000 today) — may be as good an investment today as it was then. My big-tech champion analysts Richard Vigilante and Steve Waite think it may be even better. Who knows? They have been right many times before. I worry that Qualcomm has too many lawyers. They say that’s crucial to success today in government-regulated telecom markets. Without lawyers, such as former President Steve Altman — who framed the company’s licensing and patenting strategies — those inventive Qualcomm engineers like current CEO Steve Mollenkopf might as well return to the universities whence they came. But no doubt, lawyers and all, Qualcomm is in the broadband seat today. Want to talk dominance? As even casual observers of the tech world will know, there is no love lost between Qualcomm and Apple, often times Qualcomm’s best customer. The two spent years in court accusing each other of unnatural acts with patents and processes. The venom overflowed, with some $4.5 billion explicitly at stake in the lawsuit, and long-term implications several times as great. "It's the 'Reboot' We Need," Says Tech Genius, George Gilder... The Apple Knife Fight With the end of litigation in sight, Apple, sick of the internecine conflict, urgently wanted to put Qualcomm in its rearview mirror. It announced plans to buy future 5G modem chips from Intel rather than Qualcomm. (It had already been buying current generation modem chips from Intel, though Intel’s devices were demonstrably slower.) Then Intel — the seminal semiconductor firm of all time — found it could not do the job. For its 5G modems, Apple scurried back to Qualcomm, tail firmly between legs. Apple did buy Intel’s intellectual property to build its own modem business, but is not expected to create its own modem chips for several years yet. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. Now Wi-Fi Too (We Mean 6) Q’s dominance is spreading as well as deepening. Wi-Fi modems were once rather low-tech affairs, typically single channel devices operating at low bandwidths over very short distances. It looked like too humble a business to interest the mighty Q. Today Q dominates the field for WiFi-6 modems, operating at gigabit speeds, using breakthrough Massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MMIMO) antennae connecting multiple devices across shared frequencies at ranges once undreamt of. WiFi6 is so robust and capacious, and above all un-licencious (that is free of government licenses and auctions), that I believe WiFi6 is going to usurp many of the markets currently contemplated for the government standard 5G. Why? Why does this hardly young company proceed from conquest to conquest despite dozens of competitors vying for its business? Qualcomm has dominated the field for more than 20 years because it has always addressed the twin challenges of the physical transmission of a signal, and the coding of the signal to transmit maximum information for a given amount of bandwidth as a unified problem. Seeing the two challenges as one does not make the problem easier. Just the reverse. But it has made Qualcomm’s triumphs more complete every step of the way. | 
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