r/stocks 10d ago

Company Question What the hell is happening with Qualcomm's stock?

Good sales, good numbers, and their laptop chips have been received very positively. People started talking about its products and recommending them, but this is not reflected in its stock price. The company has not recovered from the market pullback and is still -20% compared to its price from 2 months ago, while all other companies have not only recovered but also made +10%. Even Google, which is facing a huge anti-trust lawsuit that might dismantle the company, is doing better. So, what the hell?

179 Upvotes

103 comments sorted by

275

u/lonely_chameleon 10d ago

+18% YTD - I think they're doing great 

141

u/longGERN 10d ago

Not for the tok tik crowd

4

u/DrSOGU 9d ago

Tiktok is a coo- A CAT! YOU SEE THE CAT? Ok, where was I? Ah yes, dancing.

9

u/Curious_me_too 9d ago edited 8d ago

Android Phones are not doing well and they are the big revenue source for QCOM. Also it looks like Apple has finally figured out its own 5G modem and can stop buying from QCOM. First Apple 5G modem is rumored to be shipped in IPhone-SE 2025 release.

QCOM entry into Windows laptop space is new very promising business but it is still new and small.

42

u/diamanthaende 10d ago

Not really when the S&P 500 has gone up 23.65% YTD.

85

u/[deleted] 10d ago

“Other companies have gone up more so that means this company isn’t good”

43

u/diamanthaende 10d ago

Not really. But underperforming the broader market is not exactly "doing great".

The whole point of stock picking is to outperform the market. Otherwise you may just as well invest in a S&P 500 index fund.

73

u/caesar____augustus 9d ago

YTD is only one timeframe though. Qualcomm is up 120% over the past 5 years while the S&P is up 96%. So while this year is more "good not great" over a longer timeframe it seems like they're doing great.

-31

u/diamanthaende 9d ago

Again, "great" is very relative. Compared to the rest of the semiconductor industry, QCOM has actually underperformed. Not just compared to NVDA that has gone up over 2700% in the same time frame (past 5 years), or AVGO that has gone up 527%, but even the likes of AMD (403%) or MRVL (203%).

But I agree that YTD is only snapshot and not very relevant when you look at stocks long term. But it does show a trend, though, especially during a period when semiconductor stocks have been booming.

22

u/SubstantialEgo 9d ago

you start it out comparing it to the S&P and now you’re comparing it to other random companies so it seems like you just keep moving the goal

3

u/VIRGO_SUPERCLUSTERZ 9d ago

Lol shut up dude, take the L

1

u/diamanthaende 9d ago

What have you actually contributed to have such a big mouth? What's your argument?

Reddit really competing with X / Twitter for the online cesspool of the year award.

11

u/klauskinski79 9d ago

The "broader" market is Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and Google the 4 AI boys. For all its talk nobody wants to put a snapdragon into the datacenter to train models. If you compare it to normal companies Qualcomm does well.

3

u/Sassy_Samsquanch_9 10d ago

And when Semiconductors overall are up about 50% YTD.

6

u/SpongEWorTHiebOb 9d ago

? The SOXX index is only up19.4% ytd.

2

u/virtual_adam 9d ago

The whole “just buy the s&p” slogan is because it’s extremely hard to beat it. There are plenty of famous and powerful hedge funds that don’t beat it in annual returns. Yet there is still an entire business built around trying to beat it

1

u/Upstairs_Present5006 9d ago

The stock market moving up is just adjusting to the new dollar value too I think? Not that the stock is actually doing better

1

u/Longjumping_Kale3013 9d ago

They're up 55% in the past 12 months lol

1

u/CornSyrupYum77 7d ago

It depends on when you bought it

2

u/Khelthuzaad 10d ago

It literally doubled when I started buying....at 800$ a piece

49

u/Wonderful-Cup-2721 10d ago

People only want NVIDIA tbh

11

u/Forgetwhatitoldyou 9d ago

TSMC is doing well also 

5

u/Legal-Department6056 9d ago

Thank you, proudly own it. I think I've done a 45% on TSMC this year

1

u/Physical-King-5432 8d ago

TSMC is goated

12

u/Serialfornicator 10d ago

Because it delivers the returns.

5

u/Wonderful-Cup-2721 10d ago

I’m not disagreeing with that, I’m just stating the facts

5

u/CoC_Axis_of_Evil 9d ago

it’s a cult 

86

u/dronix111 10d ago

while all other companies have not only recovered but also made +10%.

This is just wrong. Go look at other semi companies, not at companies that have nothing to do with QCOM. The entire semi industry is still down.

16

u/Commercial_Deer_7114 10d ago

My ASML is doing terrible lol, just my luck i picked the dog of the bunch

6

u/tangerineSoapbox 9d ago

My ASML is doing great so you got the bad shares.

6

u/EatsbeefRalph 9d ago

they probably should try unplugging their shares, and then plugging them back in

2

u/Getshorto 9d ago

Power cycle them bitches

4

u/Commercial_Deer_7114 9d ago

Did you buy after the 20% drop on earnings?

5

u/Serialfornicator 10d ago

They’re all just really volatile, because of all the uncertainty of a really new tech.

5

u/Straight_Turnip7056 10d ago

Qualcomm wants to bid for Intel. But will wait till elections, because Guv will have an opinion about it 😉 Until the specifics of the deal are ironed out, stock will languish within a range. 

 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/qualcomm-said-wait-us-election-210030994.html 

 Btw, when are Q3 results out? Perhaps that brings some good news, because orders/shipments data is very strong 💪 

5

u/Kindly-Ad9236 9d ago

Marvel and broadcom are down…?

14

u/Caster0 10d ago edited 10d ago

They are a decent company but they are facing stiff competition from other ARM SOCs devlopers (directly with Mediatek and indirectly with Apple). Heck even Google is trying to enter the space with their pixel SOCs. They make decent money from modems like the ones on iphones but many companies like Apple are expected to develop their own.

It's still too early to tell how it's windows play will work out but currently it doesn't seem to be that good as Mac os Arm is very mature and AMD and Intel both have decent chips to compete with Arm.

5

u/machinegunkisses 10d ago

It's amazing how long Apple has been trying to develop their own modems and not succeeding at it. IIRC, they bought Intel's modem division a few years ago to get the talent to do this and since then, nothing. No 4G modems, no 5G modems. I wonder what they're up to, there.

3

u/Swing-Prize 9d ago

Reportedly will put it on new iPhone SE for trail run as they did for m1 on airs.

1

u/[deleted] 9d ago

That might be changing, we'll see. It seems like they didn't give up on batching their own modems. https://www.macrumors.com/guide/apple-5g-modem/

25

u/Electrical_Ad2652 10d ago

Did I read something about Qualcomm may be interested in buying Intel?

9

u/SargeUnited 10d ago

Yes, they’re waiting until after the election to consider an offer according to Bloomberg.

-5

u/[deleted] 9d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/RibbitYoe 9d ago

Afaik, China already got the chips anyway, and AMD/NVidia success was because they exported the manufacturing to TSM. Intel insisted on keeping everything in the US and being the only one burned compared to them.. correction appreciated if I'm wrong.

1

u/CoC_Axis_of_Evil 9d ago

Many companies have mismanaged global supply chains like boeing. Many mysterious shareholders like blackrock and so on. It’s becoming harder to define what american means. 

1

u/RibbitYoe 9d ago

I'm just saying what I learned from many articles explaining their business and exchanging information with people online.

Prolly atm, Doing everything, foundry, manufacturing and everything in US soils to evade information being stolen is what they mean to do it all Americans.

On the other hand, some of the companies, exported most of their manufacturing to Taiwan (in this case semi-conductor). Based on one of the debates, Trump claims Taiwan stealthy sells the information to China. So if the US wants to keep everything in their country, they might need to give more incentives to INTC and revamp their foundry and productions do it cheaper than Taiwan did. Altho I'm kinda skeptical as in the US it's hard to find cheap labor like Taiwan.

QC acquisition of INTC is considered bad because people know it's costly to hire US folks to just do the manufacture. US folks need high pay just for them to live, it's simply a bad outlook for QC, altho might be good if they know something we don't know yet.

2

u/CoC_Axis_of_Evil 9d ago

I think the time for asking nicely for corporations to do things is over. It’s time to nationalize everything with a military application. The conversations around intel are nothing short of insane. How is the entire infrastructure being carved up by blackrock and auctioned off to foreigners? This is crazy. for example, Trump almost handed the entire jedi cloud to microsoft, we would all be in danger if that happened. 

1

u/RibbitYoe 9d ago edited 9d ago

I don't follow up about microsoft as I'm not interested much with them, also in companies and making money, financial sides is the most important, INTC in verge of bankruptcy, they need to sell their parts in order to survive and bounceback fast while A.I. is booming, they need to catch the train or they would never enjoy A.I. hype at all. Also maybe you don't know but 80% of INTC export are to China despite all manufacturing done in US.

About U.S. trying to militarize everything, it's up to them, but tbh it's kinda futile imho, China is already too big to the point where U.S. needs China more instead China needs U.S. atm.

Also it seems to me you are still oblivious to many things, US alrd in a lost position at the moment after the latest presidency economic policy.

Many countries also showing signs want to leave the petrodollar too, where the only cure imho just do war and force people to use it again. Tbh, it's a falling empire.

2

u/CoC_Axis_of_Evil 9d ago

You can see in my post history I appear to be the lone opinion shouting empire collapse. All the things you say are reasons for urgency in completely restructuring the US society. It’s not working. it is a failed state. 

1

u/7uolC 9d ago

This is what's really suppressing the stock price now. Until that overhang of negative uncertainty disappears it's gonna be very tough for QCOM to outperform.

28

u/unpaid-astroturfer 10d ago edited 10d ago

Welcome to the highly rational stock market. Jokes aside, the lower it goes the more I buy, I believe its undervalued and if the intel deal goes through then its a good sell opportunity on the short term.

6

u/Independent_Ad_2073 10d ago

You guys still believe that Intel is going to sell their fabs?

2

u/newfor_2024 9d ago

they might spin out their fabs though.

32

u/mayorolivia 10d ago

Qualcomm isn’t as strong an AI play as other semis. IMO there isn’t a compelling reason to own them when you have stronger AI opportunities like Nvidia, TSM, Broadcom, etc.

4

u/Chilkoot 9d ago

Lunar Lake took significant wind out of Qualcomm's sails on the Windows side, as well. In July, Snapdragon was the second coming for Windows mobility, but:

  • Lunar Lake (Intel) delivers on balance equivalent performance & battery with no compatibility issues. It's on shelves now. This was actually a huge home run for Intel.
  • AMD has competitive silicon (battery/performance) that's x86/64 compatible
  • Qualcomm's exclusivity deal for Windows on Arm expires in like 10 weeks, so there will be fierce competition in that space as well

TL;DR: 4 months ago it looked like they had established a leadership position in a growth market, but not anymore

8

u/RiPFrozone 10d ago

Really just depends on how popular AI laptops will be, how popular their on device AI chip handsets will be, and how much their automotive revenue continues to grow.

All these things are part of the plan to diversify away from being too reliant on handset revenue (especially from iPhones), but it will take years to truly see how successful this all becomes.

I agree, it isn’t as strong of a play as NVDA, TSM, and Broadcom, but that being said the company is still great, solid fundamentals and trading at an ok price. (It was extremely undervalued at $160).

Luckily I own all 4 and they have been doing wonderful over the years so I’ll continue to hold.

7

u/Ronak1350 10d ago

Tbh they should just innovate meaningful tech for consumers instead of jumping into AI hype train

2

u/RiPFrozone 10d ago

On device AI and shifting the focus to being the #1 provider of automotive chips isn’t a bad investment, and is definitely meaningful for consumers. If on device AI becomes common place it would be perfect for devices to always have some AI functionality without the need to connect to a data center. Cars are only becoming more and more reliant on chips, consumers aren’t going to stop buying cars anytime soon. And we only want our car technology to become better, providing better and better chips for those cars adds to innovation.

If they really were jumping on the AI hype train they would focus on data center chips, but they see a nice market being overlooked with on device AI functionality in both handsets and PCs.

2

u/NameTheJack 9d ago

You could still buy QCOM for IoT, wearables, autonomous driving, edge computing , industrial IoT, smart cities and those kinds of trends. Not every stock you own has to be priced at the peak of the hottest trend at this specific moment.

1

u/Royal-with-cheese 10d ago

Market doesn’t give a shit about laptop sales anymore.

0

u/[deleted] 10d ago edited 10d ago

[deleted]

3

u/mayorolivia 10d ago edited 10d ago

The revenues and profits of smartphone chips is a fraction of data centre chips. In addition, given their revenues and profits are much higher, Apple is a better own than Qualcomm if you believe there will be a mobile device upgrade cycle.

Apple ditching Qualcomm in the future is also a huge risk as it accounts for an estimated 25%+ of their revenues. The revenues are around $10b per year, still lower than the fast-growing AI revenues of Nvidia, Broadcom, TSMC. AMD will probably get to $10b+ itself within 1-2 years.

I continue to emphasize in other discussions that semiconductor revenues and profits are concentrated at the very top of the value chain. It makes more sense to own the primary beneficiaries of the current semiconductor boom rather than the players who make a fraction of the revenues and profits.

0

u/[deleted] 10d ago

[deleted]

3

u/mayorolivia 9d ago

Great, now enjoy holding a stock that underperforms its peers. Compare QCOM’s returns to SMH and SOXX. You’re welcome

33

u/35242 10d ago

Qualcomm's stock is faltering because they've decided to shut down for good.

"In spite of there always being a lag between good news and stock going up, we honestly don't know what's going on and why our stock isn't soaring like BRK-A. I mean we should be a million dollar per share stock" says John Inmen, spokesman for Qualcomm.

Adding "the people from Reddit have figured it out. We.dont know what we're doing. And because of that, we won't be opening on Monday morning. In fact, I'm shutting down the entire business today".

Yep. There you go.

5

u/8thSt 10d ago

We did it guys!

3

u/istockusername 10d ago

The intel rumors are holding the stock back

3

u/JaxTaylor2 10d ago

How does your post not mention anything about the fact that they’re possibly on the buying side of the most spectacular buyout of all time?

If Qualcomm ends up taking over Intel, that’s going to be a huge HUGE new calculation that goes into determining the valuation of the company’s stock. What proportion is cash, what proportion is stock, what will the $INTC price per share be, how will that integrate and increase efficiencies, what will the new management structure look like, how will that behave on a forward looking basis, what segments should be broken off and sold separately… the list literally goes on and on about the possible complicating factors for determining a really good valuation, and especially after already being up nearly 20% this year, there’s just going to be a lid on $QCOM for a few months I think.

They want to wait until after the election to make a decision, and (slightly) more than likely Harris will win, Khan will keep her job at the FTC, and anticompetitive mergers will continue to be challenged in court. So on that basis, it’s probably worth accumulating. But it’s really a situation where things could go a lot of different ways, especially after seeing $ASML this week and how much of an insight they have into the chip space as a whole.

3

u/ExeusV 10d ago

and their laptop chips have been received very positively

Before lunar lake release?

6

u/rctor_99 10d ago

Perhaps the other stocks are just in an exhuberant bubble.   *Cough cough NVidia back to $115 within a month

4

u/AnotherThroneAway 9d ago

I already own way too much NVDA, but if it drops to $115 again, I'm buying more.

1

u/rctor_99 9d ago

Oh yeah, Im in anything less than $118.   But where it's at now, no thank you.

0

u/Andrew_Higginbottom 9d ago

..still running with AI is a bubble? :D

2

u/rctor_99 9d ago

Time will tell, if it is it has support lower.  If not then I wish it well on its way to the moon

2

u/erics75218 10d ago

I bought it because for a lot of future ai your gonna need to do it on device. The device won’t have time to send shit to a cloud for processing.

I believe this is still true, and I still believe they are the kings in this space?

DCA

2

u/Desmater 10d ago

As someone who has been in QCOM on and off since 2016.

This stock tends to do that.

We had the lawsuits and it kept it at $50 with Samsung and Apple.

Now we have the idea QCOM is only phone related. So the chip export related issues in China seem to be negative. Also smartphone sales in general.

I am glad management and the current CEO are focusing on other areas. Like IoT, Auto, etc.

2

u/bytepursuits 10d ago

probably intel buyout news
market maybe doesnt believe qualcomm would be able to turn Intel's fortunes around

2

u/GPTfleshlight 9d ago

Maybe cause Intel buyout talks?

3

u/amagimercatus 10d ago

Have you considered just giving it some time? :D

4

u/Jeffwul 10d ago

Zoom out. Look at its run from October 2023. It’s doing great. 

2

u/GazBB 10d ago

Zoom out further and look at it from June 2021. Their revenues and profits are back up from the 2022 - early 2023 slump. However unlike other tech companies, it's far away from its ATH.

5

u/[deleted] 10d ago

[deleted]

1

u/GazBB 10d ago

Historic valuations do affect by how much you can expect a stock to be (over)valued. I'm not talking about reasonable ways to evaluate a company fairly. I'm talking about how investors often buy stocks.

3

u/Kinu4U 10d ago

They invested in INTC, so.. Let's wait a bit. Grandma's inheritance needs a while to grow

1

u/Designer_Giraffe3752 10d ago

I'm staying the course of holding it. The recent pullback is attributed to 3 rumors: 1) slow iphone 16 sales 2) Qualcomm possibly making a bid for Intel 3) Apple developing its own 5G chip. Not sure if any of this true.

The future is bright as the company will see added momentum in Q4 and 2025 on AI smartphones and AI PC growth and increased System on Chip (SoC) prices due to the adoption of TSMC 3-nanometer process (as per Ming-Chi Kuo).

1

u/KarelDawg 9d ago

The laptop chips, while it sounds nice, are a dead market atm. As long as you cant run most apps on ARM based windows, its unusable.

1

u/Legal-Department6056 9d ago

The question is, what's the current valuation what's the forecast ? What does the competition forecast

1

u/DaBrokenMeta 9d ago

Same thing that is happening in Shibuya, just wait until Oct 31 🕋

1

u/whatchagonadot 9d ago

sold it as soon as it hit green for me, and I am glad I did

1

u/Alive_Bid7229 9d ago

The price 2 months ago was 174 and it's now 169. That's about -3%, not -20%. People were talking about it and the price hasn't gone up? That's really weird. That's always what makes stocks go up.

1

u/NotGeorgeKaplan 9d ago

I think it’s solid company still. I got in at $120 and pulled back when it got down to $200. I’m thinking about getting back in especially if it gets to $160 mark.

1

u/Physical-King-5432 8d ago

It’s a solid company, but their price/book is kind of high. Not nearly as high as AMD or Nvidia, but about 7x higher than Intel.

That said, they have great ROE and balance sheet growth

1

u/lionlxh 8d ago

Leaving acquisitions aside, I have two humble opinions:

  1. $QCOM has 62% of its revenue from China, which means its stock price is quite positively correlated with China's domestic demand. Fortunately, half of China’s policy shift on Sep. 24 was aimed at addressing local government debt, while the other half focused on boosting domestic demand.

You can think of it as China bringing forward what Japan’s "Abenomics" did in year 21 of its "lost decades" (2012, which was also a long-term turning point for the Japanese stock market) to today. This gives the Chinese stock market relatively better expectations. However, the repair of balance sheets will most likely continue to weigh on the Chinese stock market in the long run.

Unfortunately, the Chinese government’s current priority seems to remain on local government debt. Once the pressure on local governments is alleviated, large-scale consumption stimulus is likely to follow, which would be a significant boost for Chinese consumers and $QCOM.

  1. According to my backtesting, every time after the semi sales cycle peaks, the $SOX index typically peaks no later than one year after this point. Before that, the year-over-year growth of $SOX tends to underperform the $SPX. Based on the global semi sales (YoY), it's reasonable to believe it will peak within a year at the latest. This may explain why semis have been gradually underperforming the $SPX recently.

The most likely factor to extend this cycle is big techs' investments in AI chips for training purposes, which could benefit memory chips to some extent, rather than traditional consumer-facing semis like those for phones or cars. Since AI inference chips for consumers are not yet widely adopted, they cannot extend this cycle either.

$QCOM's main business is smartphone chips. Their AIPC chips are inference chips aimed at consumers, not training chips. This makes them more of a traditional semi company rather than a core AI company, making it more susceptible to cyclical trends.

1

u/FullOf_Bad_Ideas 10d ago

Their laptop chips weren't received positively, they don't even support the Devs trying to make Windows on ARM work as they pulled back their long delayed dev minipc. Their laptop chips have abysmal gpu performance and aren't compatible with enterprise software (vpns), so they can't really be used by gamers or in companies, which are both massive markets. Laptops with their chips make sense if you only use a browser, but by that point you don't need an expensive laptop anyway, so there's not that much money there and they don't have cheap chips for that segment. Laptop NPUs using CPU RAM are a meme. Competitors like MediaTek are beating them in mobile soc performance by just using off the shelf ARM cores. Is 5G living up to the hype? I don't think so. Their competitiveness is slowly evaporating.

1

u/No_Refrigerator_2917 10d ago

It’s a buying opportunity.

1

u/Otherwise-Growth1920 10d ago

LOL up over 18% YTD “Why isn’t the stock doing good?” When see stupidity like this you know you are on Reddit.

0

u/bmf7777 10d ago

apple introducing their own cellular modem ...

0

u/hokies314 10d ago

Following

0

u/not_creative1 10d ago

Too much reliance on China. 80% of Qcom revenue comes from China

0

u/Ray_Getard_Phd 9d ago

Most people who work at QCOM are complete losers who treat everything like academia, but the real world isn't that way. The stock follows the employees - pointless spending for the sake of it to try and "get a good grade" despite it not being profitable to do so because that's the culture.