Qualcomm wants to lead 5G pivot into the metaverse
Qualcomm has improved & innovated wireless technology for over 25 years. The company’s CDMA & 5G patents have helped keep infrastructure up to date, while Qualcomm’s silicon has been used in many of the world’s leading mobile network providers to power their devices.
With its purchase of Niantic Labs, Qualcomm aims to bring an immersive AR-based experience to the masses.
Chris Amon, the newly re-appointed CEO of Qualcomm, announced that they see the metaverse as a potentially massive market like the smartphone industry today. They estimate that it might grow as big as 300% of iPhones and Android phones available today.
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The use of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset in virtual reality headsets is becoming more widely accepted, according to Qualcomm’s Amon. Not only are they right for the task, but the quality will be top-notch, just like with humans.
Amon’s comment on Qualcomm coming out in support of the metaverse is not surprising. A lot of large sectors – Disney, Facebook, and so on – are leaning towards doing it. With the popularity of VR and AR, a lot of people may end up living significant portions of their lives in virtual worlds. To meet this demand and thus adapt, the economy will probably shift toward providing entertainment in virtual spaces over traditional forms like arcades.
Making predictions is tricky, but SK Telecom’s vice president seems to understand that “the metaverse is our future business model” and it will be their core platform.
A message of diversification
The interest in the metaverse is significant because it stems from Qualcomm’s partnership with multiple companies and anticipated expansion.5G is flourishing more than ever before. Capitalizing on this success, the executives of Verizon and T-Mobile are looking for new ways to grow their revenue. Unfortunately, some investors are turning their backs on these carriers due to poor share price fluctuations over the past year. But what’s important is that 5G continues to thrive despite the financial struggles of the
“We’ve started to diversify,” Chairman and CEO of Qualcomm, Dr. Paul E. Jacobs, said of his company in an interview with CNET in a Q&A segment in December 2016. “For a long time we were focused on a single end market and a single customer relationship, but now I feel like we’re truly diversifying.”
Mobile technology has proven to be a big part of the company’s business, CEO Amon said, but “There’s more to Qualcomm.”
Qualcomm is shifting its focus away from lower-end smartphones and focusing on smart technologies such as IoT, AR, and VR. They’re also really diversifying into other industries like AI, robotics, and automotive design.
And “XR” devices – those sporting augmented and virtual reality capabilities – represent one big category of devices on which Qualcomm is betting. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon silicon powers the new Oculus headset from Facebook, a company that is so sure that the metaverse will be a “thing” that it has rebranded itself as “Meta.”
Qualcomm is putting its “metaverse” into the IoT business segment next to its OTHER OTHER products for drones, wearables, smart city operations, industrial sensors, and other gadgets. And that’s still a relatively small business compared to all of what they make.
However, Qualcomm’s plans for smartphone technology, as well as their commitment to 5G have been visible throughout the process.
“This is a phenomenal time for us,” Amon said. “We have an incredible opportunity to grow,” he argues. He says that a wide variety of trends, ranging from edge computing to artificial intelligence, will drive demand for the company’s silicon designs that support inexpensive, low-powered computation. He said that Qualcomm’s prospects have been picking up in recent years due to AI tools, which have been used to help with addressability and marketing. The expected growth of the market will cause an increase in demand.
