- The staff of South Korea's Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) allege some of Qualcomm's (NASDAQ:QCOM) IP licensing practices are illegal, and recommends a fine and business practice changes.
- Qualcomm insists its practices are in-line with global norms, and plans to challenge the staff's findings before the KFTC commission. The company has also been dealing with probes from the U.S. FTC and EU regulators; its Chinese dispute was settled in February. EU regulators have been examining the links between Qualcomm's chip and licensing ops; the FTC has been probing the potential violation of obligations to license patents under FRAND terms.
- The allegations come at a time when Qualcomm's relationship with major customer/Korean IT giant Samsung (OTC:SSNLF) has become quite complicated. Samsung opted to exclusively use its Exynos app processors in the Galaxy S6 and Note 5, and also used its own baseband modems in many versions. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 baseband/app processor (next-gen flagship, expected to be manufactured by Samsung) will reportedly go into at least some Galaxy S7 models. However, Samsung recently unveiled the Exynos 8890, a baseband/app processor with custom ARM cores and support for 600Mbps peak 4G download speeds.
- Qualcomm recently officially launched the 820, while promising 30% lower power consumption than the Snapdragon 810 (believed to have overheating issues), significantly improved performance via its custom Kryo CPU cores and Adreno 530 GPU, and up to 600Mbps download speeds via an integrated X12 modem. A recent FierceWireless article (has been taken down) indicated the X16, a modem delivering 1Gbps peak download speeds, would arrive in the summer of 2016.
- Shares have fallen to new 52-week lows.
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Update: Bernstein's Stacy Rasgon notes only some of the allegations made in a 2009 KFTC staff report regarding Qualcomm wound up being accepted by the commission. "At this point, we have no idea what the Commission will determine, nor what remedies might be imposed, and we would expect years of appeals before anything concrete (beyond fines) would occur. Nevertheless, the nature of the charges outlined in the Examiner’s report is likely going to cause additional angst among investors who are already worried about the long-term sustainability of Qualcomm’s licensing business..."