3G drives Qualcomm profits up

Qualcomm this week reported a 15% year-over-year boost in profits last quarter, driven by shipments of Wideband CDMA and CDMA 1X EV-DO chipsets.

Qualcomm posted profits of $560 million, up from $486 million a year earlier, despite only an incremental increase in revenues over the same period. The chipset vendor took in Q3 revenues of $1.36 billion, up 1% from last year’s fiscal third quarter.

Qualcomm shipped about 36 million MSM chipsets to handset manufacturers worldwide in the third quarter, compared with 35 million in the same quarter a year earlier, but fell off slightly from the 37 million shipped in the second quarter. While Qualcomm officials said the market for W-CDMA hasn’t taken off as quickly as it at first thought, shipments are still strong.

“Volume shipments of W-CDMA and 1X EV-DO MSMs have increased substantially year-over-year and sequentially,” said chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs in a statement. “We look forward to further increases in the quarters ahead.”

Qualcomm, however, backed off from its original estimates 213 million handsets containing its chipset modems shipping this year, dropping its projections to 203 million. It also dropped its estimates of 50 million W-CDMA handsets shipped to 45 million. Qualcomm officials said the change was primarily due to slower sales of UMTS handsets in Europe than it originally expected.