Bloomberg’s Ian King claims that 1,231 workers at San Diego headquarters and an additional 269 employees in Northern California will get the WARN, or Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification notice unpopularly called the pink slip. The axe is expected to fall on June 19.

Qualcomm is looking to make itself more appealing to shareholders and improve performance numbers. Chip companies of this size have a lot of bets and side projects and unfortunately not every single project has a long perspective. People are being shuffled from project to project and that means some jobs will go.

If Qualcomm succeeds in acquiring NXP, there will be a lot of redundancy and overlapping, but Qualcomm is still confident that the deal will be approved. China will give US based Qualcomm and EU based NXP some hard times through its regulatory agency, but this seems to be very much related to recent trade war threats made by USA and China.

Future is still bright

Not that anyone can forget about it, Qualcomm is the leader in 5G and we don’t see anyone launching 5G before, and nowhere is the technology in better shape than at Qualcomm. 5G thing will define the next decade and you can bet it is as important as you can imagine. This is just one piece of technology, however with dozens of other important stuff that the firm is working on. It has the potential to have massive growth in automotive even without NXP and it already owns most of the smartphone market in US, Europe and China. It also has some wireless technologies such as MESH - Self Organising network, something that none of its competitors have. 

Qualcomm was also a leader in 4G and that brought us things like Uber, Google Maps navigation, the popularization of social networks and a dozen other technologies that changed everyday life and touched everyone’s life.

5G can help this to happen for industrial IoT, smart cities/infrastructure and a faster internet on every device you own. Qualcomm's new president, Cristiano Amon, gets the market and through a few conversations that Fudzilla had with him and a few other people in the reporting structure, we are confident that the bigger picture looks good.