Who Are The Executives?

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon has rallied the stock 50% since he took over in June of 2021.

He believes that the largest upside is still coming: artificial intelligence. QCOM has historically made their money through making processors and radio chips for mobile phones, but they are about to push into microprocessors for personal computers, which has historically been dominated by Intel and AMD. Amon is responsible for the push to take the Snapdragon from the mobile device to a PC, and his timing seems perfect: AI capable PCs need low power, high-end graphics and strong AI processing. Snapdragon is a solid replacement.

Dell, HP, ASUS, lenovo, and Microsoft have all unveiled Snapdragon-based PCs.

Cristiano Amon also has domain expertise: he's an electrical engineer by trade. He's been at the company since 2004 and was key for getting QCOM a dominant position in the 5G market

From a 2022 interview, he gave us his goals for the business:

When I became president in 2018, my number one goal here was to accelerate the global transition to 5G. In fact, you may have seen or not have seen, but a key milestone in that process was when we launched 5G one year ahead of schedule. We had an event at Mobile World Congress that pretty much every executive of every company that we partner with — from operators to infrastructure vendors, to test equipment, to manufacturers — was there at the Qualcomm booth, toasting that we’d done it. I think that was my number one objective.

I didn’t like the set of cards that we had with 4G. I think 5G was an acceleration — it was instrumental to resolve a lot of the disputes we had with some of our customers and change the position of Qualcomm. So that was my clear goal in 2018: how do we commercialize 5G one year ahead of schedule to drive that global transition from 4G to 5G?

The second thing, which I started as president and has been my key goal as CEO, is to diversify the company. We put in a lot of effort. It’s not easy, by the way, to build new core competences in companies and to be able to pivot. I’m not saying this to give myself any credit. I think this is a general statement that every CEO would agree with. If you’ve known your entire career how to do one thing very well, learning new things is a difficult thing to do. But you know, I was and I am in a hurry to diversify the company. We needed to build expertise in a different areas. Our front end was one, automotive was another one. And then, the broader transformation of the edge, which we call our Internet of Things business.

So my goal as CEO, going back to your question, is: how do I change Qualcomm from a company that has always been very focused in communications in cellular into the company that provides all the processing, the cloud connectivity, and the artificial intelligence for everything that happens outside the data center? We call that the edge. I think that’s the mission I set for myself to build at Qualcomm and that’s the journey we are on right now.

Sources: https://www.leadershipmattersshow.com/episodes/cristiano-amon