Qualcomm at JPMorgan Conference: Strategic Expansion in AI and IoT

On Wednesday, 14 May 2025, Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ:QCOM) shared its strategic vision at the 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference. The company highlighted its growth opportunities in sectors like AI, IoT, and automotive, while addressing challenges such as Apple’s insourcing of modems. Qualcomm aims to leverage its technological strengths to drive revenue growth and maintain shareholder returns.

Key Takeaways

• Qualcomm plans to return 100% of its free cash flow to shareholders this year.
• The company targets $4 billion in revenue from both the PC and industrial IoT markets by 2029.
• Qualcomm anticipates AI will transform smartphone use cases, similar to the shift from feature phones to smartphones.
• Collaboration with Humane in Saudi Arabia aims to enhance Qualcomm’s data center solutions.
• Automotive sector growth is expected to continue, driven by digital cockpit and ADAS solutions.

Financial Strategy and Shareholder Returns

• Qualcomm is committed to returning all of its free cash flow to shareholders this year.
• The company maintains a flat operational expenditure while focusing on new growth areas.
• M&A strategy emphasizes acquiring teams and technologies to boost organic growth.

Operational Updates

• Qualcomm’s partnership with Humane in Saudi Arabia will leverage low-power CPU and AI capabilities for data center solutions.
• The company is expanding edge AI applications across devices, including PCs, XR, and industrial sectors.
• Qualcomm’s automotive strategy involves increasing silicon content in vehicles and enhancing digital cockpit and ADAS solutions.

Future Outlook

• Qualcomm targets $4 billion in revenue from the PC market by 2029, focusing on the transition from x86 to ARM architecture.
• The company expects significant growth in the industrial IoT sector, driven by edge AI and new use cases.
• Qualcomm aims for $2 billion in XR revenue by 2029, with a focus on wearable computing engines.

Market Insights

• Qualcomm’s smartphone market strategy includes a shift towards higher-end devices and AI-driven functionalities.
• The company expects AI to transform device use cases, potentially increasing content and replacement rates.
• Qualcomm’s automotive revenue target implies a 26% compound annual growth rate from fiscal year 2026 to 2029.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed analysis of Qualcomm’s strategic initiatives and growth prospects.

Full transcript - 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference:

Unidentified speaker, Host: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for coming to the conference. I have the pleasure of hosting Qualcomm. And from Qualcomm, Akash Palkiwala, who’s the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer. You for coming to the conference. And thank you to the audience as well for attending.

Akash, I’ll start you off with recent developments before we dive deeper into the business. And you did have an announcement yesterday, I believe, with investments in the Middle East region with Humane. So maybe just flesh out the details of that announcement. And for investors, particularly, what should be the key takeaways of the amount of investments there?

Akash Palkiwala, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm: Sure. So for those who don’t know, Humane is Saudi’s government’s data center initiative. And so they’re building very large data centers at scale. And what we announced yesterday is us working with Humane to develop data center solutions both for inference and for CPU chips. If you step back, our view on data centers and AI has been very consistent.

We’ve always believed that AI will be hybrid, just like computing. You’re going to have a lot of AI happen in the cloud. You’re going to have a lot of AI happen on the device. And that vision is going to play out over time. And so we’ve been very focused on on device AI till now.

As you know, the USP for Qualcomm is really being able to do processing at very low power. And so we’ve done that both from a CPU perspective. We believe we have the leading CPU in the world, period. And then we have our NPU, processing engine, that does AI inference workloads on the device as well. The change in the data center that’s happening is obviously the move to inference inference becoming a lot more important and the importance of low power.

And that’s where Qualcomm shines. Those are the two technologies, both from an inference perspective, low power perspective, where we have unique value proposition. We have unique technology on the device. And so what you heard from Humane, the announcement we made yesterday in The Middle East, is really us bringing those technologies to the data center. So this is bringing our CPU to the data center and bringing our inference capabilities to the data center.

And so we’re going to develop joint solutions with Saudi AI, which is the humane entity. And you’ll see that develop over time. So this is a MOU for now. Over time, as we kind of go through the next few months, we’ll be talking a lot more about it and outlining our strategy around it So very excited about the opportunity.

It gives us a chance to leverage our technology portfolio in the data center, which is something we’ve been thinking about for a while. Just

Unidentified speaker, Host: following up on that. One, you said this develops over time. Any thoughts around what that means in terms of timing? And then how are you thinking about the broader opportunity beyond this project alone? I’m sure you’re trying to quantify the market as you enter that.

So how are you quantifying the market?

Akash Palkiwala, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm: Yes. So I’m going to hold off on giving details on that question because there’s a few pieces to this. This is one of the pieces. And we’re going to assemble that and give the overall strategy in the area. But I think the key message to take away in my mind is there’s a lot of importance of low power solutions, both from a CPU and AI perspective.

And it’s a strength that we have on the device. And this is our opportunity to bring it to the cloud.

Unidentified speaker, Host: And I’ll ask you another follow-up on this. So forgive me for pushing you on But we’ve talked about this opportunity on and off over the years. And when you think about the technology stack you have today, does it enable you organically to address this opportunity? Or do you think there’s more that you need on the technology stack where you probably potentially have to go externally and look for pieces that add to your capabilities and enable you to realize the full opportunity over time?

Akash Palkiwala, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm: Yeah. I think in terms of processing, both on the AI and the CPU side, we have assets internally. It’s really kind of the connectivity assets that are something that we don’t have. And so we’ll look at both organic, opportunities to get those assets. But those things combined will be the full solution that we need.

And of course, there’s work to do on the software side. But this would be everything we’d need on the hardware.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay, great. Since we’ve covered that recent announcement, let’s maybe move back to more of a thematic question, which is where do you think the industry stands today relative to edge AI adoption? How are you thinking about the different avenues Qualcomm participates in sort of the broader edge AI adoption over time?

Akash Palkiwala, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm: Yeah. So I’ll start with the same place I started on the first question. Our view is pretty simple. I think over time, processing was split between cloud and device. AI is going to be split between cloud and device.

And so you need to be on both sides to be able to drive AI processing. And so we are very excited about edge AI opportunities. If you think about our strategy, we obviously started with phones. But now we have PCs, XR, industrial, robotics. In each of these areas networking in each of these areas, being able to run AI workloads on the device, incredibly important.

And so we are very excited. We think this is kind of a long term trend that drives multiple things for us. It drives differentiation in performance. It drives ASP growth because more content is going to be required. And it drives new use cases, which will also eventually result in increased replacement rates for devices.

So very excited. I think the strategy for us is pretty clear. We’re enabling the guts that are needed to drive these use cases. And then, of course, our partners who are making the devices are going to play a very key role in having the use cases and enabling them at scale. So I’d say we are in the first innings.

We’ve obviously seen a lot of use cases that have come through on Samsung devices. Google Gemini, very focused on the edge, very focused on it as a part of Android. We’ve obviously heard other OEMs talk about it. Microsoft has been very focused on it as well. So we’re excited.

We think eventually what will happen is a transformation of use cases, transformation of devices. And of course, it creates an opportunity for us. Maybe to leave a couple very specific use cases, if you think about having agentic AI, so having an agent on a device that you can talk to that can give you information about things, the phone, obviously, being the most personal device you have at this point, is going to be incredibly well positioned to take advantage of it. And so I think that is very important. And it’s going to play out at scale very soon, I think, over the next twelve months.

The second is the reason to do things on the phone outside of cost because obviously cost wise it’s free versus using data center that’s expensive we’re going to have a lot of context data on the device about the user, about what the camera is seeing, as an example, what the audio is hearing, what the position location of that person is. It gives you a lot of context data to run AI workloads that are important. So that is the second reason. The third is privacy and security. A lot of these agentic AI use cases, there’s a lot of information about the user that they’re going to learn.

And you want to leave it on the device. You don’t want to move it to the cloud. And then there’s an opportunity because of that as well. So we’re convinced it’s a transition that is happening, has started to happen. It’s going to happen at scale.

And it’s going to happen in every device we are in. So for us, it’s foundational to the transformation of the company. For

Unidentified speaker, Host: my next question, though, I’ll start you off on another not PCs or smartphones, but industrial IoT, an area that you’ve sounded very excited about in recent times. And you have a target now of $4,000,000,000 of revenue from industrial IoT. Maybe just help us understand the driver there. How much of the growth is about creating a new market opportunity with your products versus displacing some of the incumbents? And how do the acquisitions of Edge Impulse, Focus dot ai support the build out there?

Akash Palkiwala, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm: Yeah. So this is definitely an area we’re incredibly excited about. I’ll draw the parallel to auto. And let me talk about auto for a second because it leads to how you need to think about industrial IoT. Automotive had a very established semiconductor market.

And there were a set of players who participated in that market. When the transformation of the automotive came about a few years ago, two things happened. One is there was a massive increase in the amount of silicon that was needed in the car to enable connectivity cockpit and ADAS. The second thing that happened is the existing players in the ecosystem did not have the technologies that were needed to enable the transition. And so that allowed us to establish an incredibly strong position going into it.

We think industrial is the same as the auto market was five years ago. And this is a much, much bigger market. So you have a set of players that are microcontroller players that have significant presence there. We’re seeing the beginning of a tremendous and a lot of it is driven by Edge AI tremendous transformation of the use cases that can be enabled in industrial. And I’ll give you a few examples in a second with AI, with processing, with cloud connectivity that weren’t being done before.

And if you think about the data that gets created at the edge on an industrial device, so far we haven’t been able to harness And what AI gives you is this unique opportunity to harness the data and make decisions based on it. And so we are at the very, very front end of a massive transformation of what you can do in industrial devices with processing and AI at the edge. And the existing players are not going to be able to make the transition. So whether you look at the microcontroller industry, whether you look at industrial PC industry, those current suppliers will not be able to transition to wireless connectivity, low power processing, and AI.

And Qualcomm’s uniquely positioned to play that role. So that’s the general premise is the industry transforms. It brings the technology requirements closer to what we do, and we’re in an incredible position to take advantage of it. Now let me give you a couple examples of how to think about this. Camera is an easy easiest one to think about.

If you if you look at security cameras today, the way it works is you have a bunch of security cameras. Then there is a person in a room looking at the screens trying to figure out if there’s an event or something happens that they to act on. The reality is going forward, what you should be using to make decisions on it is AI. And so you can easily have AI running at the camera, taking in the stream of video that comes through the camera, and making a decision on if there has been something inconsistent that happens. Right?

So very simple home security camera. If you’re outside your home and if it’s you, the camera should know that this is the person who lives here, and so I don’t need to give a warning. But someone else shows up, you need to give a warning. If you think about an industrial setting, if a person walks into an area who is not allowed to be in that area, does the the camera can flag something that has happened? If you think about an enterprise, what time did someone come in?

What time did someone go out? You can look at secure areas, non secure areas about attendance very easily with the availability of a camera. And then if you think about a manufacturing line, the camera can do the same. It can look at something and make a decision on whether there is inconsistency in the manufacturing line. You need to reset the line or look at something that’s not specifically correct.

Very easy to do that. If you want to take it to oil and gas, you can use a camera to make a decision on corrosion of a pipe that you need to go and repair, as an example. So there’s just tremendous set of use cases once you combine something like a camera with AI to be able to able to do it. The the second example I’ll give is is robotics. If you think about robotics today, the largest scale robots today are ADAS and cars and something like a Roomba at home.

But you’re going to see a lot of robot robotics come through. Of course, there’s a lot of conversation about humanoid on one end, but then manufacturing robots are going to get transformed. You’re going to have drones playing a very critical role. And if you think about robotics, what are the technologies you need for robotics? You need wireless connectivity.

You need low power processing. You need AI. You need a really good camera. You need great vision technology. You need object tracking technology.

It’s everything that Qualcomm does well in one device would be robotics. So we are incredibly excited. And these are just two examples within industrial where we feel like we have the right to be the leader. Just like we had the right to be the leader in cockpit and ADAS in cars, we have the right to be leader in these places as well. Sorry for the long answer, but clearly I’m excited about this.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Thank you. I’ll move you to another segment where you have an established target from the Investor Day, XR, the XR market. And I think when you now today look at the average investor perception of XR market, it’s seen as a market that really didn’t fulfill the volume expectations that investors had. But you have a target of $2,000,000,000 of revenue relative to what I would call more bearish investor expectations. So maybe outline what do you see as drivers, how much more of a volume opportunity do you see for the XR market to realize the $2,000,000,000 revenue opportunity that you stated?

Akash Palkiwala, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm: Yeah. So I think fundamentally, when you step back, we have this belief that there is going to be a computing engine, a personal computing engine, that you’re going to be wearing in some form. And you can argue that it’s a watch. You can argue that it’s glasses. You can argue that it’s a ring.

But eventually, you’re going to have something that is very powerful that can hear what you hear, see what you see, sense, things around you, and then help you act accordingly. and and we think that’s the glasses are And we think that the glasses are a perfect way to do it. So let me first kind of put our financial forecast in context and then really outline why I believe the market has the opportunity to be much bigger. The financial forecast we laid out, which is $2,000,000,000 in ’twenty nine, is really based on 30,000,000 units per year, dollars 15,000,000 for XR, 15,000,000 for AR.

And we think that’s a very conservative small number. I think most bears on the market would probably align with that number as well. We think the market has the opportunity to be much bigger. And I think using agentic AI as a trigger is very important. Because once you are wearing a device like this and it can hear what you hear and see what you see, you have the ability to have an AI agent sitting on it and be able to interact with it.

And it’s just a tremendously powerful paradigm that could be a standalone device, or it could be a device that uses the processing capabilities available in the phone. I think creates a set of use cases that are incredibly powerful. One kind of recent example I’ve seen is using glasses as a form of hearing aid. Because if you have microphones on glasses, it can take in the volume. It knows which ear is not great in hearing, and it can amplify it and play it through a speaker.

And that’s just one example of being able to take advantage of what this brings. A simple use case of an older person wearing glasses and just being able to say, hey, remind me to do this at 04:00. And you have an agent sitting on top of the glasses and listening to it and following up on it You can obviously look at something and say, what phone is this? And it would say it’s a Samsung Galaxy 25 phone.

So I think there’s just a lot of use cases that will come through. And I’m already ahead of the curve because I wear glasses. Glasses.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Moving to PCs. Yes. You talked last quarter about or the earnings call itself about the 9% share that you have of the market. But maybe help us think about the drivers of the revenue expansion that you’re looking at for the PC market. How much of it is driven by the market growth versus Qualcomm proliferating more across price tiers in the different price tiers in

Akash Palkiwala, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm: the PC market? Yeah. Obviously, we’re a very small player in the PC market today. And as a result, we’re not really tied to what is the size of the market. It’s really adoption of our solution.

And let me break it down into two parts. First is transition from x86 to ARM. And we think that has already happened on the Mac. And we think it’s going to happen over the next several years on the PC as well on Windows. And it’s not just us.

I think you’re going to see other players come in and drive that transition. I think in China, there was a new PC announced with ARM by the largest PC player in China recently as well. So very excited about that transition happening. Now as that transition happens, Qualcomm is in an incredible position because we are the leading ARM supplier in a lot of other markets that requires high end computing. And so we’re going to bring those capabilities into the PC industry.

Now, that’s kind of the broader statement. If you look at the specific strategy we have in the shorter term is we launched our first set of chips in less than a year ago. And what we’ve done since is we’ve launched four different platforms. We are addressing all PCs about $600 all Windows PCs about $600 And so that is obviously a very large portion of the market. I’d say we’ve done a very good job of addressing applications porting for the consumer ecosystem.

And so the number that we quoted was 9% share of all retail devices greater than $600 in the Western part of the world, US and five countries in Western Europe. And we think we’re in a great place to continue to scale that volume. The next step for us, obviously, is to get to similar app ecosystem parity on enterprise. And that’s a longer problem statement. And so we think that comes over time.

But very confident in our long term strategy, in the long term addressable market and revenue target we’ve set up. This is the total revenue in the market today based on today’s scale is $35,000,000,000 We have targeted approximately $4,000,000,000 which is 12% -ish of the market, which we think puts us in a very good position to get there over time and hopefully exceed that target. So super excited about the transition in the PC industry. It’s going to move over to AI centric devices that will require very strong NPU and CPU capabilities. And we think the existing players are not as well positioned as we are to make that transition.

And you talked

Unidentified speaker, Host: about the $4,000,000,000 target by 2029. Maybe just talk about how back end loaded should we think the driver will be given that enterprise comes over time? Or do you see a more linear ramp? Or should we just expect a more back end loaded with the enterprises?

Akash Palkiwala, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm: Yeah, I think we’ve been clear about this. We expect the layering into the market to happen over time. No different than how auto played out for us. And so similarly thinking about as you hit new milestones, you start scaling revenue a lot more. It will play out the same way.

Unidentified speaker, Host: So I’ll switch over to autos. And really what I was wondering about, and we were doing the math on what your autos revenue target implies, implies about a 26% revenue CAGR between FY ’twenty six to ’twenty nine and relative to what you performed in the last few years. So it was 56% growth in fiscal ’twenty four, ’20 ’4 percent in fiscal ’twenty three, ’30 ’6 percent in fiscal ’twenty two. And given how the automotive backlog or pipeline really translates into revenue, we would typically think growth from an absolute dollar perspective starts to accelerate as you go through that pipeline. So why shouldn’t I think of the guidance from here on till fiscal ’twenty nine for autos being a bit on the conservative side?

Akash Palkiwala, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm: I’ll say the opportunity for us in automotive is tremendous. I think we’ve come in as an outsider in the industry five years ago. And arguably, are the most important chip supplier in the industry going forward. Couple kind of things have happened. So as I said earlier at the beginning of this conversation, the amount of silicon content in the car when you make this transition from, let’s say, auto one point zero to auto two point zero is just tremendous change in terms of amount of silicon you need, both on the digital cockpit side and the ADAS side.

And that creates this incredible opportunity for us. So in what is perceived to be a flat market, the silicon SAM is growing incredibly fast. If you think about our advantages in digital cockpit, which is really where all the revenue growth has come from for us over the last three or four years, I think it’s going to be very difficult for someone else to come in because you’re going to need a lot of processing technologies. You’re going to need a lot of new AI technologies coming in. The software skills that required are very, very difficult for people to address as well because you need a safety software system, whether it’s QNX or Linux.

You need Android or other operating systems for the user interface. And you need to be able to do all of this as in one piece of silicon and be able to enable AI agentic use cases as well on top of it. So the market is changing by a lot. And Qualcomm is incredibly well positioned. I think our design win pipeline is also very geographically diverse.

So if you look at the major players in The US, in Europe, in Japan, Korea, in India, in China, we are very, very broadly deployed across all of them. I think at the recent Shanghai Auto Show, there were about 60 cars that launched six-zero cars. 100 cars total launched, 60 of those had our digital cockpit chip launching on that day. So we feel very, very optimistic on our position in digital cockpit. In ADAS chipset side, again, very strong position because we bring the strength of our cockpit franchise into ADAS through our flex solution.

So what flex is is you can use the same piece of silicon to do both, to do cockpit and ADAS. And then you can also, when you get to higher tier cars, you can use the same silicon platform to do both, which is a tremendous advantage that we bring in. And so very, very excited that we’re seeing a lot of adoption for our ADAS chipset platform. On the ADAS stack side, you will see BMW over the next several months launch globally with a jointly developed stack between BMW and Qualcomm. And so we’re very, very excited about it because I think what is going to happen is there is going to be a lot of demand from auto OEMs to have a stack that is a Western stack.

And we can be an incredibly good alternative for people to leverage. And so so very excited about the stack business going forward as well. So I think you’re right in your observation that we’re kind of on the front end of our journey. Although we are scaling incredibly fast, the opportunities for us are very significant. And so very optimistic about how we do relative to our long term targets.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay. And maybe just on the capability side, particularly on the ADAS front, if we compare you to companies like Nvidia or Mobileye on that front, which are your competitors, And specifically, maybe focusing on level three plus autonomous systems, where does Qualcomm’s capability sit today? And clearly, a lot of the market excitement this year has been about robotaxis. Where do you see Qualcomm participating in that opportunity as well?

Akash Palkiwala, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm: Yeah. I think there’s no constraint on us in terms of silicon presence and participating in the higher end of the ADAS market. I think a lot of the design wins that we have in China, which is really focused on that tier of the market, is the proof of that. And I think as we go forward, we’re going to have the ability to continue to leverage this strategy that I just outlined across all levels of ADAS. It’s not just a level two, level two plus conversation.

It goes over to level three and four as well.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay, great. So maybe let’s switch over to smartphone for a bit. Talk about the growth drivers for Qualcomm within smartphone market, excluding Apple as a customer. You reported low double digit growth consistently over the last six quarters in your handset business. How sustainable do you think that growth rate is?

Akash Palkiwala, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm: We’ve been very explicit about how we see the handset business growing going forward in Android. Two very important trends are happening. We are continuing to see a mix shift up in devices. And that is not a one year trend. That is not a three year trend.

I think we’ve seen that over five years. So from fiscal twenty nineteen to 2024, the number of devices over $400 has gone from 20% of the market to 30% of the market. That trend is continuing. All our recent quarterly performance has benefited from that trend. And also I’ll say it’s not a one market trend.

It’s not just a trend in the Western Hemisphere. It’s not a trend just in China. It’s a global trend. So that’s the first driver. The second driver is within a tier, especially at the top of the market and the premium tier, we’re adding a lot more capability to our devices, to our chips.

And I know we’ve had this same conversation over the last five years. Can you keep adding capability? And can you keep increasing the prices? And the reality is the amount of functionality that’s required in the device and now AI being the next big driver, we’re going to have to add capability to deliver what the OEMs want. And so we have pretty good predictability over the next three years that we’re going to add more capability and which is going to drive our ASP.

So feel very confident about where the device is. I think we are going to see the device transform with AI use cases coming in, which will also create kind of one content increase opportunities, but then also this mix shift up and eventually an increase in replacement rates as well. So we think the market is very well positioned. And then within that, we are

Unidentified speaker, Host: very well positioned. Okay. So maybe now including Apple in this discussion, talk about the cost structure in relation to being able to protect earnings while Apple moves to the in source modem. Particularly, should we think about the 30% QCD margins as still the right long term framework without Apple revenues in there?

Akash Palkiwala, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm: Yeah. So if you step back and think about the target we set for our auto IoT business in ’twenty nine, we talked about $8,000,000,000 going to $22,000,000,000 in revenue. That increase is much, much bigger than the loss of the Apple revenue. So I think that’s kind of your foundational principle on how we’re thinking about the company overall. As we lose the Apple product revenue, we’re going to grow auto and IoT that far surpasses the loss on the Apple revenue.

So that’s kind of the basic foundational framework. In terms of OpEx, the way we’ve been managing it over the last three years is you’ve seen us keep the OpEx flat. But within that, one, absorb the merit increases. Second, redirect our investments to these new areas of growth. And that’s the strategy we are planning to continue going forward.

So we want to be able to fund these new areas of growth, execute on our plan, give investors breadcrumbs as we go through the execution of those strategies. And feel pretty comfortable that we have a core technology base that is leverageable across these areas. That’s kind of the key thing to remember is we create the technology once and then apply it to all these different end markets rather than having to reinvest from scratch on every new area we’re going into. And that’s why we’ve been able to scale the OpEx.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Last two questions, and I’ll try to squeeze them in here. I wanted to compare the AI opportunity on smartphones to how the five gs cycle played out. Where do you see the sort of similarity versus the differences between the two cycles?

Akash Palkiwala, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm: Yes. So I wouldn’t compare it to five gs. I would compare it to the transition from feature phone to smartphones. I think it’s not about adding more capability in the existing use cases. It is about transforming the use case of the device.

And so that’s the right way of thinking about it. And if you go back to the lesson on what happened when you made the transition from feature phones to smartphones, there was massive increase in what the chip needed to do. It created demand for four gs and five gs as a result of it. But I think that’s the foundational transition that you should think about and compare it to. And I think it’s coming over the next several years.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay. Got it. And then there was a step up on the last earnings call, there was a step up in capital return that you announced. And I think investors largely appreciated that. But maybe if you can talk about the, one, what’s driving that?

Secondly, implications on your M and A strategy. Do we see those step ups in capital return as it being exclusive to M and A? How should we think about them?

Akash Palkiwala, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm: Yeah. So I think our overall capital return program has been consistent over the last several years. We’ve always said we’ll return most of our free cash flow to shareholders. We’ve seen our free cash flow grow significantly over the last two years. And so what we announced at the earnings call is we’re going to return 100% of our free cash flow to the shareholders this year.

And so I kind of see it as consistent with our strategy at the higher end of the band, but not different than what we’ve said before. Clearly, given where the stock price is and was, we’ve been taking advantage of that. And so that has been one of our motivations to step up capital return. And as it relates to M and A, really the strategy doesn’t change. We’ve done a large number of acquisitions that have been kind of acquiring teams or technologies, very small in terms of size.

We’ve done a few acquisitions that have been material in a low single digit billion scale. And the goal of each acquisition is to accelerate the organic strategy. And so that’s what we’ve done. And I think we’ve done well with the strategy. If you kind of think about all the different acquisitions we’ve done, you’d probably consider most of them successes.

And that strategy also remains unchanged. We’re going to look for opportunities like that that help accelerate our plan. Since we have a minute left, I’ll try to squeeze in

Unidentified speaker, Host: one more, which is your latest thoughts on how the tariffs impact the overall industry and any insights or any thoughts you have about the implications of the Section three thirty two investigation and what the different scenarios there are.

Akash Palkiwala, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm: So I’ll be candid. This don’t have enough insight on scenarios that can play out in the future. So the way we’ve approached it is how does things as they stand today impact us. And as we said at the earnings call, we don’t see a direct impact to us at this point. It’s immaterial in the scheme of things.

And so that was contemplated in the guidance we gave, the commentary we gave for kind of our company going forward as well. I think in terms of end product demand, we’ll have to see how the tariff scenario plays out. And it’s really an industry question. It’s not a Qualcomm specific question. I think as we diversify into different kinds of devices, it helps us.

The second is because of our global presence, it’s a different conversation for us than maybe it’s for other companies where they’re very concentrated in The US. I think global presence helps us. I’ll

Unidentified speaker, Host: wrap it up there. But thank you for coming to the conference. Thank you to

Akash Palkiwala, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Qualcomm: the audience as well. Thanks, Thanks for coming.

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