“It’s painful not to be able to supply all the chips your customers ask for,” Qualcomm (QCOM) CEO Paul Jacobs said in announcing the company’s fiscal second quarter earnings. The leading designer of chipsets for mobile devices beat Wall Street’s expectations handily, but its stock price skidded on news that the outlook for the current quarter may not be as bright. Qualcomm says its manufacturing partner, Taiwan Semiconductor, cannot make enough 28nm chips to keep up with demand. The 28nm cuts made into the Qualcomm’s chips are among the very smallest in the industry, allowing Qualcomm to pack more functionality onto its chips than most competitors.
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For its second quarter, Qualcomm reported net income of $2.23 billion, or $1.28 a share, on revenue of $4.9 billion. The company continues to dominate the mobile device chipset market, with preliminary Q4 estimates from IDC Corp. showing Qualcomm with 36% of the global sales volume for all semiconductors for mobile devices, and 56% of the sales volume for applications processors, the brains that make smart devices smart. In the baseband modem market, Strategy Analytics estimates that Qualcomm had 45% of the market for all of 2011.