China Lockdowns Helped Qualcomm Reach 'Supply Equilibrium’ Sooner: CFO

Not much has changed in the way Qualcomm has talked about industry supply constraints, Chief Financial Officer Akash Palkhiwala told a Bank of America investors conference Wednesday. “We're probably one of the companies that started talking about the constraints much before anyone else,” he said. “We have a good sense of what's going on in the industry, and so that has allowed us to react quickly.” When the supply constraints happened, Qualcomm “put in place a very aggressive plan to do multi-sourcing, to work with our suppliers, to increase capacity, and that has allowed us to radically improve our performance in terms of supply over the last couple of years,” he said. In 2022's second half, “we expect demand and supply to reconcile to a large extent,” said the CFO. “We always thought it would be a combination” of supply improving and demand declining “a bit.” he said. “Those two were required to get to equilibrium.” The COVID-19 lockdowns in China were “obviously, very unfortunate,” but those affected demand to such an extent that they helped Qualcomm “get into supply equilibrium sooner,” he said.