CES: Qualcomm Unveils New Products

At CES in Las Vegas, Qualcomm unveiled a raft of products and customer wins beyond its mobile stronghold, trying to show it can continue as an independent company, according to Bloomberg.

The company, target of a $105 billion hostile takeover bid by Broadcom, touted dominance in automotive chips, new processors for voice-controlled speakers and components for wireless headphones. It’s taking market share from Broadcom in home Wi-Fi routers and will soon challenge that company’s position in antenna parts for smartphones, Qualcomm said at a presentation at CES.

“Most people think of us as mobile-only,“ Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon said, while noting the company generated $3 billion in sales outside of its main business in 2017. “We’re going to markets that mobile technology is disrupting. The new designs that redefine some of those markets are using Qualcomm. “

The company has $3 billion worth of orders for automotive parts, Amon also said. As carmakers try to upgrade their center console and infotainment displays for smartphone-addicted consumers, Qualcomm is being asked to provide the technology, he said. Qualcomm is directly taking on Broadcom in Wi-Fi chips for home routers, said Amon. Until now internet service providers have used cheaper, less-capable chips to build the modems they give to consumers, he said. As that market has been challenged by startups providing products with better Wi-Fi capabilities, Comcast and others are responding by upgrading their offerings, and are increasingly using Qualcomm chips, he said.

And within phones, Qualcomm is poised to take share from Broadcom in the market for radio frequency, or RF, parts, said Amon. New 5G wireless services will require phones capable of connecting to multiple frequency bands. That’s done currently by increasing the number of RF chips. A new product from Qualcomm can be tuned to different frequencies, avoiding the need for many of these extra chips in phones, he said. LG, HTC, Samsung, Sony and Google are all signed up to use the new Qualcomm RF offering, said Amon.