Qualcomm

Licensing-and-royalty model in a hardware industry.

Latest filing on file · 2025-09-28

Revenue: $44.3B; FY2025 · USD; 10-K · period ended 2025-09-28Source
Operating margin: 27.9%; FY2025; Operating income / revenue · filingSource
Operating cash flow: $14.0B; FY2025 · USD; 10-K · period ended 2025-09-28Source
Capital expenditures: $1.2B; FY2025 · USD; 10-K · period ended 2025-09-28Source

Overview

Business model and origins

CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) was a superior wireless standard to the GSM the rest of the industry had adopted. Qualcomm bet the company on CDMA being adopted, and then structured its business so that every CDMA device in the world owed Qualcomm a royalty regardless of who made the chips.

2 episodes2026-06 case file as of

Origin

Irwin Jacobs and six co-founders left Linkabit to found Qualcomm in 1985. The company's early projects included satellite tracking and a trucking logistics product (OmniTRACS). The strategic turning point was CDMA: Qualcomm invented and patented the CDMA standard for wireless communications. When the US wireless industry selected CDMA as an alternative to GSM in the 1990s, and when CDMA became the basis for 3G globally, Qualcomm's IP portfolio became mandatory. Every carrier and device manufacturer that shipped a 3G device owed Qualcomm a royalty on the price of the device — not the chip, the device. The business model decoupled Qualcomm's revenue from chip manufacturing competition.