高通的真正威胁根本不是英特尔或三星

at the end of the day, Samsung's real focus is the Galaxy phone. If they can buy the part they want from Qualcomm at a price both can live with, they will do it. It takes a lot more company resources to actually get Galaxy S6, 7, 8, 9, etc., out the door than it does to make Exynos. And getting Galaxy models out the door is really Samsung's purpose.

Bottom line: Qualcomm is going to continue to face competition. But at the core of Qualcomm's business model is something that is unique and continues to give it a powerful competitive edge.

Qualcomm's Highly Unique Business Model

The differentiator for Qualcomm has always been the highly unique process the company uses to advance its technology. That process gives it the key criterion that sets companies apart in the same industry - a long-term technological edge and the ability to protect it.

What Qualcomm does that I have never seen replicated so successfully elsewhere is making its intellectual property (IP) a centerpiece worthy of big-time revenue on its own. Qualcomm Technology Licensing (QTL) generated $1.785 billion in revenue last quarter, down 0.6% year over year. As usual, QTL was a very high profit producer, with 83% of its revenue (last quarter) resulting in earnings before taxes.

What's amazing about Qualcomm is that patents typically offer more psychological comfort than property value to big companies. I've been around the block, own a few patents myself, and I know how hard it is to actually manage intellectual property in a way that brings any direct revenue to a large company

By contrast, Qualcomm has actually found a way to package and trade its licensing technology almost like baseball cards. It's like owning a T206 Honus Wagner card and selling it over and over without releasing ownership. But it's beyond that. It's like owning all the valuable baseball cards out there, and the entire sports memorabilia market, and well you get the idea.

In fact, those patents are so essential that without them, not just Qualcomm's but anyone's, chipsets are denied access to certain large markets. These crown jewels from Qualcomm are the vital backbone of wireless standards.

Qualcomm Has a Durable Advantage over Samsung and Intel in Wireless Chip Design

Let me be perfectly clear here. Qualcomm stumbled with the Snapdragon 810. They either didn't have all the intellectual property they needed or they licensed too much IP to Samsung, or they did poor chip design despite all the advantages they had.

That's on Qualcomm's management. Qualcomm's chipset segment, Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT), needs to produce the best version of company IP available in their new chips. They've done so in the past, but last time they failed.

Still, coming in second is a fixable problem for Qualcomm given the company model. Should Intel, Samsung, or others come across with patents that Qualcomm must license, then Qualcomm's business model and possible fixes are, indeed, threatened.

As it stands now, these competitors do not have that IP. Qualcomm's IP gives it a durable advantage in chip design. In essence, "If they fail to own the right IP, Qualcomm will fail." With that in mind, the only real competitor Qualcomm has is Qualcomm.

Qualcomm vs. Qualcomm?

You cannot decouple advanced thinking from build-it thinking. If you do, you get a lot of very smart people inventing very useless things. Patents developed are rarely targeted at where they need to go - into something the market wants.

Qualcomm's intellectual property has been