Editor’s note: Howard Lindzon is co-founder and CEO of StockTwits, a social network for traders and investors to share real-time ideas and information. You can read his full bio here and find him on Twitter @howardlindzon.
It’s Super Bowl week so it’s time to talk about chips – the ones that go in “smart” things, not the ones eaten by Americans. This week’s headlines have been dominated by Facebook. I hear they are quite big with the college kids. But, Qualcomm really is crushing it. They deserve a little attention. They are bigger than Facebook at $108 billion. Today, Qualcomm added approximately $5 billion to their market capitalization, thanks to a blowout quarter of sales ($6 billion) and profits ($2 billion).
It has not been all giggles and balloons for Qualcomm. You TechCrunch readers don’t remember the good-old days. The “real” bubble. Not your silly web 2.1314 diversion. In 1999, Qualcomm went from $3 to $83. That was on the Nasdaq, not AngelList. It was a glorious bubble. Taxi drivers did not have Square…they had E-Trade accounts.
As you can see from the Qualcomm chart above, things got a little messy in 2000. There was no Facebook to save us. Mark Zuckerberg was sneaking half drunk gin gimlets at Bar Mitzvahs. My “smartphone” was a Star-Tec. Retina display? Yeah right!
Qualcomm stabilized in 2003. The new attack on 1999 all-time highs began in the middle of 2010. Time will tell if Qualcomm can stay friends with everyone. The great thing about the stock market is you do not have to be first to catch a trend. Qualcomm is doing business with all the handset leaders and couldn’t care less about the fights between, Apple, Google, Facebook and Samsung. If you love the mobile web and the “Internet of things,” put Qualcomm on your list of companies and stocks to watch more closely.