@cz You are 100% correct. The CFO in the annual meeting proudly claimed the company was diverting it's entire Free Cash Flow to buybacks and dividends. That checks out. In FY25, buybacks were ~$8.8 B, dividends were ~$3.8 B and FCF was ~$12.8 B. But R&D expenses total only ~$9.0B, and have barely budged (+$0.2B) in the last three years (FY23-FY25). So there's plenty of cash flow to fund transformative R&D projects, but maybe a) there are no such opportunities or b) they believe (perhaps correctly looking at their track record) there is insufficient imagination and engineering talent or business capability to generate any future earnings growth. So they triple down on buybacks while continuing an off-shoring "strategy". In the meantime they tout auto/compute and agentic AI while feathering their nest. This can only continue for so long until the story fizzles and the company shrinks into irrelevance. That process is already well underway.
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if a company feels pressured to spend ~4X it's annual income ( qcom annual earnings 2025 ~5 billion $) just to shore up it's own stock through buy backs....all the while spending nearly ZERO on transformative R&D...is literally signing its own death certificate !
sadly...QCOM will soon be another Moto ...best case scenario an MTK or an auto supplier.
accumulation of leadership blunders over years no doubt... also nuvia acquisition didn't deliver much...compute business will not take off, nor will data center/AI narrative convince anyone.
Don't forget the Christmas tree and cheap mic