That’s a “loaded” question btw.

Here’s what we know from Qualcomm’s results today:

http://www.qualcomm.com/connect/investor-relations

(quarterly results page)

You don’t need to look much further than Qualcomm’s rev growth and “MSM growth” to maybe start getting the same idea that I’m getting.  Which is that Apple may be doing even better in the mobile device wars than we thought.

EDIT:  No longer so sure.  See below post.

[deleted]

Mav - 01 February 2012 09:52 PM

[deleted]

I see they are a major supplier and their income is up ~40%. What do you see here that tells me something in addition to aapl income up100+%?

Qualcomm is a major “arms” supplier for the Android/etc. ARM-based competition and while Qualcomm seems happy about these flagship “MSM” shipments (I had to do quite a bit of digging, but giving ‘em max benefit of the doubt I’ll assume most all MSM chipsets are Snapdragon SoCs), they shipped 32% more than last year.  Good for Qualcomm.  But hardly for the manufacturers they serve.

As a major proxy for smartphone AND tablet growth (they shipped ~ 156M chipsets this year, into a smartphone/tablet combined market of maybe 450M for this quarter), that’s one of the first signs of hard evidence that the non-Apple smartphone competition is getting absolutely spanked by Apple in the very-important growth metric.

Somewhat less notable but still significant, without Apple’s contribution via its purchase of 52 or so million Qualcomm MDM (3G radio chipset) products, Qualcomm’s +40% revs growth and +20% profit growth wouldn’t be quite so impressive.

China telecom iPhone, when announced, will be a CDMA device, I believe. More good news for QCOM in parts and royalties..

Hmm..

Looked through a bunch more QCOM financials from 2011 and backwards.

Result:  I can’t divine any trends.  For all I know MSM is being used in featurephones as well.  Product line breakdown in a way is even more vague than Amazon gives (because all you see is “MSM” without much of any definition as to what that includes.  Additionally, the MSM shipment trend does seem to be accelerating with various YOY compares.

So there’s just not enough info available from Qualcomm’s financials to tell.  My bad there.

If mods want to close the thread, that’s fine by me.