5G will have an impact similar to the introduction of electricity or the car, affecting entire economies and benefiting entire societies.
— Steve Mollenkopf
If you look at where the growth is happening - tablet growth compared to the traditional PC growth - you just can't compare them.
When people talk about wearables, when people talk about connected XYZ - home, car, whatever - those are all smartphone technologies.
When you go in to get your car serviced, they plug it in and tell you everything that happened for the last six months. I walk in and get a stress test from my doctor, and they make a conclusion based off of that. That doesn't make sense to me. I would much prefer to have all of the data about myself and less about my car.
As a company, whatever the business outlook is, you want to make sure you have new skill sets coming into the company.
The licensing business is about licensing the full portfolio of Qualcomm's patents. Some of them involve the chip. Some of them don't involve the chip. In fact, the vast majority of them don't involve the chip.
You want to encourage yourself to take risks. If you make a mistake trying to do something, you can fix it later.
The internet business model changed dramatically. You would never have an Uber, you would never had an Instagram, if you didn't have a connected computer in your pocket that didn't also have a camera or a GPS.
People tend to associate Qualcomm with the chip - and they should: We're an excellent chip company - but I think we have a larger role in the ecosystem of cellular that I think people are not aware of. And our relevance to more consumer electronics - and, I would say, industries - is actually just increasing.
Cars are now saying, 'I need special features because I'm going to rely on the network for mission critical things, safety, transportation efficiency.'
In the chip business, our higher-tier products are actually becoming more expensive because more and more of the functionality of the phone comes into the chip itself. So we have been grabbing content on the phone at a time when the phone is becoming more and more like a PC in terms of things it can do.
Today, billions of mobile devices with extraordinary power are uniting with advancements in robotics artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and so much more.
If you look at the developed world, people have multiple devices now. And a phone works with a watch, with a car, with a tablet, with a number of other type of devices.
If you look back to 2008, people didn't have smartphones. Now everyone essentially has a smartphone.
If you look at a company like Qualcomm, we're a big exporter. We essentially have tremendous revenue offshore and large employment onshore. I think it's very difficult to make big changes in that.
Both parents were teachers. My father became an assistant principal, and he was responsible for discipline at the school. So I didn't get away with much at home.
If we don't figure out a way to have secure, connected healthcare, or connectivity and computing, we won't have that industry develop.
Power, of course, is very important, but really, there's a bundle of technologies you have to have to make sure they're highly integrated, so you have to have modem, you have to have connectivity, you have to have GPS, you have to have graphics, you have to have CPU.
Look at smartphones. We are seeing growth almost like a barbell. You see lower-priced but high-volume growth in the developing world. But it ends up the average selling prices in the developing world are actually a lot higher than what people think.
A heart monitor is only useful if it's being remotely monitored if there's security. That is a massive issue that you need to solve. The difference between having the Internet in your phone and having the Internet understand your pulse and the motion of all of your limbs. There's just a different level of security and robustness that's required.
People tend to not forgo purchasing a cellphone. In many places in the world, the first time they get on the Internet is through a cellphone. Pretty significant economic push, particularly in the emerging market.
Every major car company is trying to figure out, 'How do I deploy the Internet into the car? How do I get cars to talk to each other? How do I get more safety? How do I get the ownership experience to change dramatically as a result?'
I knew I wanted to be an engineer, but I didn't know what type of engineer. I chose electrical engineering primarily because it was the hardest one to get into. It's ridiculous when I think about it now, but it worked out OK.
I was the youngest kid on our street in Baltimore, and I was always playing sports with kids who were older than me. You learn a lot that way.
Qualcomm is this big innovation house that tries to figure out how we can get as many people as possible using the cellular road map. The smartphone is just the first step along that journey.
