Marginal Performance at Qualcomm

Margins matter. The more Qualcomm Nasdaq QCOM keeps of each buck it earns in revenue, the more money it has to invest in growth, fund new strategic plans, or gasp distribute to shareholders. Healthy margins often separate pretenders from the best stocks in the market. Thats why I check on my holdings margins at least once a quarter. I am looking for the absolute numbers, comparisons to sector peers and competitors, and any trend that may tell me how strong Qualcomms competitive position could be.

Unfortunately, that table doesn't tell us much about where Qualcomm has been, or where it's going. A company with rising gross and operating margins often fuels its growth by increasing demand for its products. If it sells more units while keeping costs in check, its profitability increases. Conversely, a company with gross margins that inch downward over time is often losing out to competition, and possibly engaging in a race to the bottom on prices. If it can't make up for this problem by cutting costs and most companies cannot then both the business and its shares face a decidedly bleak outlook.

Of course, over the short term, the kind of economic shocks we recently experienced can drastically affect a company's profitability. That's why I like to look at five fiscal years worth of margins, along with the results for the trailing 12 months (TTM), the last fiscal year, and last fiscal quarter (LFQ). You can't always reach a hard conclusion about your company health, but you can better understand what to expect, and what to watch.

Here is the margin picture for Qualcomm over the past few years.

Because of seasonality in some businesses, the numbers for the last period on the right the TTM figures are not always comparable to the FY results preceding them.)

Here is how the stats break down

Over the past five years, gross margin peaked at 71 percent and averaged 69.5 percent. Operating margin peaked at 36 percent and averaged 32.7 percent. Net margin peaked at 37.2 percent and averaged 28.6 percent.
TTM gross margin is 68 percent, 150 basis points worse than the five-year average. TTM operating margin is 29.9 percent, 280 basis points worse than the five year average. TTM net margin is 29.5 percent, 90 basis points better than the five year average.
With recent TTM operating margins below historical averages, Qualcomm has some work to do.