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QUALCOMM Incorporated QCOM

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Qualcomm took a $5.7B tax charge in one quarter and released the same $5.7B four quarters later, which produced a reported loss and then a reported windfall from nothing.

QCOM · price with moving averages

Daily · 6MWeekly · 3Y
$95$137$179$221$263 Sep '23Apr '24Nov '24Jun '25Jan '26Aug '26 BID
EMAs82140

Source: market data.

The business

Qualcomm does two separate things. It designs and sells Snapdragon chips for phones, cars and connected devices, which is the QCT segment and about 87% of revenue. And it licenses its cellular patent portfolio to essentially every handset maker, which is QTL, a much smaller revenue line at a 69% pretax margin.

The licensing business is the one that has always mattered most to profits, and the chip business is the one facing an identified problem.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04How it fails or surprises you
  5. 05The shape of the payoff
  6. 06Closing thoughts
  7. 07Methodology

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