Qualcomm Buys Qualphone for $18M

Staff Reporter -- Electronic News, 8/18/2006

San Diego-based Qualcomm Inc. will shell out $18 million in cash to acquire Qualphone Inc., a provider of IP-based multimedia subsystems (IMS) embedded client software solutions for mobile devices and interoperability testing (IOT) services.

Qualphone, which is also based in San Diego, is an attractive buy for the cellular giant. The company has a 3G/IP multimedia embedded client framework that can be tailored to the specific requirements of individual operators and handset manufacturers, and its end-to-end IOT services could reduce time to market.

"We look forward to leveraging Qualphone's test service, IMS technology and software development resources to accelerate the delivery of attractive and more feature-rich devices to subscribers in European and other markets," Sanjay Jha, president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, said in a statement.

While significant, the $18 million dollar deal is not a massive one for Qualcomm, which has made acquisitions that soared into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Indeed, last August Qualcomm shelled out $600 million for OFDMA company Flarion Technologies. That move gave Qualcomm FLASH-OFDM technology for mobile broadband Internet protocol services to complement its CDMA technologies.

The Qualphone deal announced today is set for completion later this month.