Qualcomm wants to diversify its portfolio and focus on PCs, AR/VR, and partners up with BMW

During its Investors Day conference, Qualcomm announced how it intends to increase its revenues, and how it plans to diversify its revenue streams and product lineup. The company announced new partnerships, namely with BMW, and talked about its strategies moving forward.

AR and VR

Qualcomm is the largest player on the market when it gets to providing mobile chipsets, and the company has been working on diversifying its business in the past few years. It has recently announced it wants a piece of the AR pie with its Snapdragon Spaces developer platform.

Automotive

During the announcement, Qualcomm announced that it has teamed up with BMW to produce and develop chips for the next generation of driver-assistance and self-driving systems. BMW’s spokesperson has confirmed that the new chips would be used for its Neue Klasse series of cars, which will be produced from 2025, which means we are still a few years away from seeing it all play out.

Cristiano Amon, the Chief Executive for Qualcomm, also said that the company “never had so many end-market opportunities”, and he mentioned that the firm has an addressable market of $700 billion, which is seven times more than the smartphone chip industry.

Chipsets

Qualcomm is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, players in the smartphone industry, and they power the majority of the high-end flagship devices, and a significant number of mid-range and low-end smartphones in the industry. Qualcomm also mentioned that it’s newly acquired Nuvia team – which it purchased for $1.4 billion earlier this year – will be working on the next generation of PC chipsets. The new chips will be Arm Based SoCs, and they will be “designed to set the performance benchmark for Windows PCs”.

It’s clear that Qualcomm wants to better compete with Apple’s M-series of SoCs, and it wants to be a massive player in the yet unexplored industry. It tried to enter the market with 8xx series of CPUs in Windows laptops and Surface devices, but they never really took off, even though they promise a long battery life and overall great performance features.

In case you're interested about the event, you can re-watch it below: