Paul Jacobs (pictured) has given up his attempt to buy Qualcomm and turn it into a privately held company.

Jacobs, the son of Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs and a former CEO and Chairman of Qualcomm, was voted off the board last year a few days after President Trump blocked Broadcom’s bid for Qualcomm.

While still on the board, Jacobs set out to raise the money to buy out Qualcomm and take it private. When he refused to drop his idea he was voted off the board.

However Jacobs has now come to the conclusion that, with a market cap of $68 billion, Qualcomm’s current financials don’t justify the  purchase price.

“As Qualcomm’s position changed, the conditions weren’t right to take it private,” says Jacobs. Qualcomm made a net loss of $4.9 billion on revenues of $22.7 billion in its 2018 fiscal year,

Since leaving Qualcomm, Jacobs has started up his own company, XCom Labs, which bought Seattle start-up M87 in March which has technology enabling a mobile phone to be used by another mobile phone to pick up a signal. 

In effect it turns a a mobile phone into a cellular mast so that a phone which can’t access a signal, but is within about 325 foot of a phone which can access a signal, can use the signal accessed by the second phone.

The technology will be attractive to network operators because it relieves them of the cost of installing infrastructure in areas where signals are spotty or non-existent.

https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/jacobs-abandons-buy-bid-qualcomm-2019-04/