Tag Archives: QCOM

Broadcom (AVGO) and Qualcomm (QCOM)

November 6, 2017 By in mergers and acquisitions, Technology, Uncategorized, white knight Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

(Note:  the company formerly known as Avago agreed to buy Broadcom for $37 billion in mid-2015.  Avago retained its ticker symbol:  AVGO, but took on the Broadcom name.  Hence, the mismatch between name and ticker.  That deal is on the verge of closing now. Presumably AVGO’s recent decision to move its corporate headquarters from Singapore to the US is a condition for approval by Washington.)

AVGO and QCOM

AVGO is a company that has very successfully grown by acquisition (my family and I have owned shares for some time).  Its specialty, as I see it, is to find firms with excellent technology that are somehow unable to make money from either their intellectual property or their processing knowhow.  AVGO straightens them out.

QCOM, a firm I’ve known since the mid-1990s, seems to fit the bill.  The company makes mobile processors for cellphones.  It also collects license fees for allowing others to use its fundamental and important cellphone intellectual property.  QCOM has been in public disputes over the past couple of years with the Chinese government, which has forced lower royalty payments, and with key customer Apple, which is threatening to design out QCOM chips from its future phones.  As I see it, these disputes are the reason the QCOM stock price has stagnated over the recent past.

the offer

AVGO is offering $70 a share in cash and stock for QCOM, a substantial premium to where QCOM shares were trading before rumors of the offer began to circulate.  The current price for QCOM (I’m writing this at around 10:30) of $63.90 suggests that the market has doubts about the chances for AVGO’s success.

Standard tactics would be for QCOM to seek another buyer, one that would keep current management in place.  Since an overly pugnacious management has arguably been QCOM’s main problem, my guess is that a second bidder is unlikely to emerge.

If I were to try to participate in this contest (I don’t think I will), it would be to buy more AVGO.  I believe AVGO’s assertion that the acquisition would be accretive in year one.  So it’s likely to go up if the bid is successful.  If not, downward pressure from arbitrageurs would abate.  On the other hand, I don’t see 10% upside as enough to take the risk QCOM will find a way to derail the bid.  After all, it has already found a way to anger Beijing and 1 Infinite Loop.

Qualcomm (QCOM) and/vs. Apple (AAPL)

May 2, 2017 By in Apple, Qualcomm, Technology, Uncategorized Tags: , , , Leave a comment

QCOM and its IP

QCOM is a company that has its roots in early Defense Department mobile communication and encription technology.  As a public company, it manufactures mobile chips itself and licenses its proprietary technology to others in return for royalty payments.  The latter, which has always been the prime focus of investor interest, comprises the bulk of its profits.  QCOM’s operating income for fiscal 2016 (ended September 25th) amounted to $6.5 billion, net $5.7 billion.  On a non-GAAP basis, each figure would be about $1 billion higher.

royalty dispute with AAPL

Last week, QCOM announced that AAPL, whose phone designs (like almost everyone else’s) incorporate QCOM intellectual property and who had been complaining that royalty rates were too high, has decided to cease making any payments to QCOM while the dispute wends its way through the courts.

As I understand the situation–and I’d bet this is a simplification of a set of very complex deals–AAPL doesn’t pay QCOM directly.  It designs phones that use QCOM’s IP.  The phones are made by contract manufacturers, who purchase the IP from QCOM.  AAPL reimburses them.

with China, too

This isn’t QCOM’s first quarrel with a customer.  In 2015, pressured by the Chinese government, QCOM agreed to pay a $975 million fine and lower its royalty rate on older technology in phones made for sale in China by a third.

implications for AAPL and QCOM

My question:  why is AAPL bothering?   Yes, it’s a lot of money.  And maybe it’s just that it wants to have the same reduction on the IP affected by the China deal.  But I can’t believe that it doesn’t have that already.

Look at the magnitudes involved:

QCOM says its next quarter revenues (and operating income) will be $500 million lower than expected because of AAPL’s action.  Annualized, that amounts to $2 billion, or about a third of QCOM’s operating income in fiscal 2016.

For AAPL, in contrast, fiscal 2016 operating income was $60 billion.  Analysts are estimating 8% growth for the current fiscal year and a 15% advance the following one.

So cutting the QCOM royalty payments in half would only raise operating income by 1/60th, or 1.7%.

my take

One way of looking at this dispute is that AAPL believes it is running out of ways to make revenues grow and has to concentrate, for the moment at least, on cost control.  That’s the typical pattern.  It would also be more evidence that today’s model isn’t the Steve Jobs AAPL any more.

 

 

 

tax rate, earnings per share, dividends and cash…: (II)

April 28, 2010 By in Current Market Thoughts, emerging markets, Industry Analysis, internet, Stock ideas, Technology, Wireless Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

lots of cash

A few days ago the Financial Times ran an article pointing out the huge amounts of cash that IT companies have been piling up over the past year.  According to the newspaper, the top ten public firms in technology have added $65 billion to their cash holdings since the market bottom last March.  Together they have about a quarter-trillion dollars on their balance sheets.  The FT points to the lack of anticipated merger and acquisition activity (anti-trust?) as one reason for the accumulation, and suggests that the industry will soon begin to buy back shares to reduce the size of their holdings.

Not all the big ten are as flush as the FT makes them seem, however.  EMC, IBM and ORCL have long-term debt that pretty much offsets the cash they have.  DELL, and to a lesser extent, AMZN, are negative working capital companies.  That is, they collect money from their customers before they have to pay their suppliers.  So they enjoy a kind of “float,” the same way that a restaurant or a hotel does.  There is at least some risk to the cash that appears on the balance sheet for this reason.  If the business slows, the cash begins to disappear as suppliers are paid.

Nevertheless, there are a number of tech firms with staggering amounts of cash and little or no debt.  They include:  AAPL, GOOG, INTC, MSFT and QCOM.

an important question:  where is the money?

As I suggested in yesterday’s post, at least some of the cash is overseas.  How much, no outside observer knows.

Oddly, as I was researching the 2004 amnesty that allowed firms to repatriate money to the US without paying much tax, I found an article that suggests that six years ago, some of the companies themselves, despite their financial control software, didn’t know where the money was, either.  And some had to postpone repatriation while they upgraded their treasury departments to create a mechanism to start the process and handle the incoming money.

Would companies like another amnesty?  An academic study that I also cited yesterday suggests they would.  Professors from Duke, Michigan and Washington conducted an internet survey on this topic.  Two-thirds of respondents said they would like a repeat of the 2004 amnesty.  The median amount anticipated to be repatriated was half of current foreign cash holdings.  Most of the money sent to headquarters would come from cash balances, though some would come from added foreign borrowing. (In the next few days, I’ll post on the limits to the confidence one can have in surveying in today’s world, and in internet surveying in particular.)

Other academic research suggests that the requirement to pay income tax on repatriated earnings does motivate companies to keep large foreign balances, and even to invest the funds in projects that will not be as lucrative as competing investments in the US.

stock buybacks

I’m not a big fan.  Maybe it’s age, but I’d prefer dividend increases.  It may be more tax efficient to buy back stock.  My objection, though, is I think every company has a compensation plan that features a policy of shifting a set percentage, say, 1% a year (but a lot more for small, fast-growing firms), of the ownership of the enterprise away from its shareholders and to its management.  I’m not sure the ordinary shareholder realizes this.  And it seems to me that most stock buyback plans retire just enough stock to offset dilution from stock options–thereby keeping this part of the compensation process from becoming evident through an ever-increasing share count.

looking at the numbers

The table below lists the big tech companies with the largest amounts of net cash (= cash and marketable securities minus long-term debt).  Although, as I mentioned above, there’s no good way to tell the location of a company’s cash, the lower the tax rate the more foreign earnings–and, I think, the larger the amount of cash parked abroad.  Note that I didn’t factor in long-term investment securities.  (You have to draw the line somewhere, and I decided I wasn’t comfortable deciding about the liquidity of firms’ non-current investments.)  You may want to do this differently, and the company financials are easily available on the Edgar site.

I also show the dividend yield, if any.  The following column shows dividend payments as a percentage of free cash flow ( = cash flow minus capital spending needs).  It gives mostly “negative” information.  That is, if the percentage is high, the company has little scope to increase the dividend, or even support the current payout in bad times.  A low percentage would be a good thing for dividend seekers, if we knew the location of the cash–i.e., whether the cash is available to be paid out.

The next-to-last column shows the stock’s pe based on consensus estimates of earnings to be reported in calendar 2010.  The final column shows what the pe would be if all the foreign-generated cash were to be repatriated and tax paid in the US.

—–stock price–cash/share—–tax rate——-divd—–divd/fcf—–pe—-pe”normal”tax

AAPL      $262            $27           27%        none         n/a           19x             21x

CSCO      $27.01        $4.20        19%         none        n/a           19x             24x

GOOG      $529           $78          22%         none        n/a            21x            25x

INTC        $23.35        $2.50        30%         2.9%      35%         12.6x         13.6x

MSFT      $30.84        $3.70       26%         1.7%       33%            14x            16x

QCOM     $37.92        $7.15        17%         2.0%      38%           18x            23x

my observations

1.  The absolute amounts of cash are huge.  They were astoundingly high percentages of the firms’ stock market capitalizations at the market bottom.  But they no longer are big enough to be a primary feature of the stocks as investments, in my opinion.

2.  The group divides into two camps:  fast growers–AAPL and GOOG; and more mature companies–INTC, MSFT and QCOM.    QCOM is somewhat of an anomaly.  The other stocks declare their growth characteristics through their pes and the presence/absence of a dividend.  QCOM hasn’t expanded much during the last half-decade and pays a dividend, yet has a higher pe than either INTC or MSFT.  This is probably due to its smaller size and its focus on mobile.

3.  GOOG seems to still be a more expensive stock than AAPL, despite the year-to-date outperformance of the latter over the former by about 40 percentage points.  AAPL’s pe is lower and its growth rate higher.  GOOG’s lower tax rate suggests more earning power outside the US, but also the potential issue (perhaps non-issue to everyone except me) of tapping overseas cash.

4.  The INTC/MSFT comparison is also interesting.  They are the two stalwarts of the “Wintel alliance” of the pc era, one the hardware genius, the other the software guru.  The market worries that time has passed both firms by.

INTC has a higher dividend yield and a lower pe, which I think expresses the market’s logical preference for a software company over its more capital-intensive hardware analogue.  Wall Street also believes, I think, that MSFT has an easier migration path away from the pc to more compact internet-centric devices than INTC, which has an obvious rival in ARM Holdings plc.  On the other hand, (I think) INTC has a much stronger management than MSFT.

INTC is paying a higher portion of its free cash flow in dividends than MSFT is, but the difference is slight.  INTC also has a much higher tax rate, indicating higher potential to tap offshore cash.

I don’t own either.  If I had to buy one, I’d pick INTC–but I would also watch very closely developments with the company’s Atom chip line and how it is faring against ARM offerings.