Qualcomm and its "large customer" have lost no love over their Snapdragon 810 breakup

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Qualcomm and its "large customer" have lost no love over their Snapdragon 810 breakup
A few weeks ago, we learned that a single, unnamed "large customer" ditched the Snapdragon 810 SoC for its upcoming flagship smartphone and undermined Qualcomm's earnings expectations. Although that's a painful blow to suffer for every business, one would be wrong to picture Qualcomm dramatizing over it. In fact, a company of such posture should be expected to take the loss like a champ and continue acing the market. Which is what Q-comm seems to be doing right now!

“We don’t win every handset design with every OEM and that’s normal for us,” company VP of marketing Tim McDonough told TrustedReviews, adding that "We are proud of our products, but we have a reasonable sense of humility and realize you don’t win every one all of the time. That’s normal. If you plan for having 100 per cent of everything, you’re going to be wrong very frequently.” Words to live by, folks!

As Qualcomm and its customers are working on multiple devices simultaneously at any given moment, the company's relationships with customers "are not defined by a single handset," explained McDonaugh. So even if the chipmaker missed on one device, it still has plenty more using its products, which constitutes "a very deep relationship" and "mutual investment". We take that as a hint that the unnamed large customer will keep partnering with Qualcomm, unless the winds of change blow in a different direction.

Additionally, McDonaugh suggested that timing issues could have contributed to its customer's decision. “If you miss the timing window for a particular handset or the timing window for a particular customer, or you take too long going from geography to geography rolling it out, that can be a make or break thing for them.” It's not a secret that the first batches of TSMC-produced Snapdragon 810 chipsets had some kinks that took time to iron out, which is an especially unwelcome scenario in the case of a worked-up customer gunning to unveil not one, but possibly two complex, expensive, bet-the-house-on-them flagship smartphones as early as March. Better luck next time, Qualcomm!

UPDATE: The article was cleared of references towards a particular customer to honor Qualcomm's request.

source: TrustedReviews

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