Qualcomm grows as Nokia face-off looms

Qualcomm today reported record shipments of its voice and data radio chipsets for its fiscal second quarter ending April 1. The 24% increase in silicon shipments were coupled with big boost in royalty revenues from its CDMA patent base and even an uptick in sales in its Internet division, resulting in record quarterly revenues of $2.2 billion and a 26% increase in earnings.

Qualcomm shipped 61 million Multi-Station Modem (MSM) chips in the first three months of the year and stated that 91 million handsets with its CDMA technology embedded were sold in the previous quarter, a 36% increase year-over-year. Revenues from in CDMA silicon division jumped 24% year-over-year to $1.26 billion. Meanwhile its licensing division, which takes in the massive influx of royalty payments from other vendors using CDMA technology, recorded a 19% boost in revenue year-over-year and a 27% increase quarter-over-quarter to $759 million.

Qualcomm, however, warned that those royalty increases could soon be in jeopardy due to its ongoing fight with Nokia over cross-licensing. Nokia stopped making royalty payments on its CDMA and W-CDMA handsets earlier this month while the two disputed the terms of a new licensing deal. Qualcomm said the effects will be seen in its fiscal fourth quarter (July through September) when the royalty checks for the third quarter are supposed to come in. Qualcomm projects that the absence of Nokia royalties could lower earnings by 4 cents to 6 cents a diluted share, which could account for more than 10% of its earnings. Some of those revenues, however, could be made up for by Sony Ericsson and Ericsson, which just lost to Qualcomm in a royalty arbitration case boosting their payments to Qualcomm in the current quarter forward.

On the chipset side, Qualcomm isn’t expecting the general industry momentum to slow. It projected this quarter’s MSM shipments to rise to between 62 million and 65 million, beating both the secondquarter and last year’s third quarter. It also estimated revenues would increase 13% to 18% in the third quarter and overall CDMA/W-CDMA handset shipments to fall between 81 million and 85 million in the quarter.

Qualcomm wasn’t the only silicon maker to have good news in the quarter. Texas Instruments saw its earnings fall by 12% earlier this week, but the company said an inventory glut that had afflicted the chipset maker’s digital signal processor division for the last two quarters had cleared up and shipments would resume at their normal pace, restoring TI to a normal growth path.