CEO Steve Mollenkopf retiring after 26 years with Qualcomm
Qualcomm’s Board of Directors unanimously selected company President Cristiano Amon to take over the CEO position from Steve Mollenkopf effective June 30, the company announced today.
Amon started working at Qualcomm in 1995. Mollenkopf has been with the company for 26 years and has served as CEO since March 2014. The company said in a press release that Mollenkopf will stay on “as a strategic advisor for a period of time.”
Amon became company president in January 2018. He has overseen the company’s successful and rapid expansion into the RF front-end space as well as continuing growth in connectivity and networking.
He said in a statement: “We have been at the forefront of innovation for decades and I look forward to maintaining this position going forward. In addition to driving the expansion of 5G into mainstream devices and beyond mobile, Qualcomm is set to play a key role in the digital transformation of numerous industries as our technologies become essential to connecting everything to the cloud. The need for our solutions has never been more pronounced and our leadership position has never been more evident. I look forward to working with our 41,000 employees around the world to create technologies that revolutionize the way people live, work and connect with each other.”
Qualcomm is a driving force behind the proliferation of 5G on the network side via its extensive contributions and R&D related to technology standardization and, on the consumer side, through its position as a mobile platform provider to smartphone OEMs. In addition to growth in RFFE, Qualcomm has been racking up wins in vehicular connectivity and is looking to accelerate the transition to virtualized, open radio access networks with a forthcoming update to its 5G RAN platform.
Mollenkopf said in a statement that he’s “immensely proud” of Qualcomm’s position as “the world’s leader in wireless technologies. “With our business model clearly validated and our leadership in 5G, this is the right time for Cristiano to assume leadership of the Company and preside over what I see as the single largest opportunity in the company’s history.”
