And the Verizon iPhone Winner is Qualcomm

Lately, I’ve been having a lot of discussions with my close circle of friends about the stocks of various players; Apple up, Verizon down, Samsung wins due to the use of their flash memory.

But by far the biggest winner was Qualcomm, and here is why:

1)    The CDMA network is alive and well thanks to Verizon’s choice to make it the platform for Apple’s iPhone. This adds a whole new level of opportunity for the CDMA developer market and gives them access to a consumer market that is not use to ease of use devices. I expect the CDG M2M ecosystem to expand for CDMA as a result of this access.

2)    Speaking of the ecosystems, we ran a webinar with Qualcomm about a month ago in the off hours. The webinar showed that CDMA is alive and well in the rest of the world. The great story there is that Verizon has opened the door for CDMA iPhones for the rest of world and the iPhone is a status symbol world-wide.  Based on Verizon Wireless we should expect that CDMA brings another 20M devices world-wide.

3)    Eschewed Standards are now the norm. The term 4G is hiding a diversity in the market that consumers will have a rough time discerning. The reality is that while everyone is expecting DSL on 4G you are not going to do that much better than existing networks and for sometime you should expect that CDMA networks will be more ubiquitous. 

While people will get confused CDMA was the best of the 3G networks and it may get the benefit of being the people’s standard.

On 1.11.11 QCOM closed at 52.23

I will warn you that I am not an active trader and there are many people better qualified to advise. I may not write the Gilder report, however, this is a very logical discussion.