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MWC 2025

Qualcomm Showcases Diversification At MWC, Launches Dragonwing Brand

Qualcomm is using this week’s Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona (where I am now) as a backdrop to showcase the breadth of its offerings — and its growing diversification strategy. This includes new cutting-edge 5G modems as well as connectivity platforms for fixed wireless access, Open RAN 5G and more — with plenty of on-device and enterprise-grade AI joining the party, too. At the heart of this effort is its new Dragonwing brand for industrial, IoT, networking and cellular infrastructure products, which takes its place alongside the now-ubiquitous Snapdragon brand for mobile, PC, automotive and other consumer applications.

Both the new branding and the new products have plenty of specific implications for 5G network operators, 5G device makers, the Internet of Things, the automotive industry and the way we all interact with AI, which Qualcomm is intent on fostering at the network edge and on-device. And from the perspective of the company itself, the breadth of announcements has to be taken as a sign that Qualcomm’s diversification strategy is working. We saw what Qualcomm did in the automotive market, and it appears to be running the same play in the industrial space.

Supporting Many Facets Of 5G Connectivity — With An Eye On 6G...On Monday alone, Qualcomm announced the eighth generation of its 5G modem-RF chip for Android phones, the industry’s first FWA platform for 5G Advanced networks, new modems for industrial IoT applications and big new deployments of 5G Open RAN with leading carriers in Vietnam and Japan. My colleagues Will Townsend and Anshel Sag will be writing more about the specifics of these offerings and what they mean in their respective market segments.

For now I want to note three things about these announcements. First, while Sag will be commenting on the new modem, I did want to point out that Qualcomm has once again raised the bar with carriers for next-generation Android smartphones. Apple’s new modems are generations behind, and it will be interesting to see how Apple will do in its premium phone lines.

Second, both the FWA and O-RAN announcements were made using Dragonwing branding, which shows how Qualcomm is already putting that brand to use in its work with network operators such as Viettel in Vietnam and NTT Docomo in Japan, and with network equipment makers such as NEC. Qualcomm has more than demonstrated its chops in brand-building by what it has accomplished with the Snapdragon brand. Time will tell whether we’ll see Dragonwing on the side of a sports arena or the front of a Premier League jersey, but I wouldn’t bet against Qualcomm’s ability to make the new brand a hit among its target audience of industrial and business customers.

Third, Qualcomm has definitely not forgotten its roots in wireless. Last week I attended a briefing on these new products from Qualcomm executive Ignacio Contreras, and he seemed proud to point out the company’s ongoing commitment to wireless R&D — and how that has translated to high performance in the products themselves. To take one example out of many from this week, the new Dragonwing FWA Gen 4 Elite Platform has a 5G millimeter-wave range of up to 14 kilometers, along with NTN satellite capability and more.

Qualcomm has developed a highly refined view of where wireless connectivity is heading. Qualcomm

Qualcomm showcased its wireless research in yet another announcement in the runup to MWC, this one written by senior vice president of engineering John Smee. (His research bona fides? A Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton.) It’s well worth a look if you aren’t at MWC but want to see the broad range of what Qualcomm is exploring for current and future network technologies, very much including 6G.

IoT And Industrial IoT: As Much Promise As Automotive?...Research that drives advances in wireless technology is so important because more connectivity is needed more urgently in new contexts with each passing day. Not coincidentally, demand for connectivity is growing rapidly in areas where Qualcomm has focused, including automotive and IoT.

As I explained in my writeup of Qualcomm’s Investor Day at the end of last year, the automotive segment has been a winner for Qualcomm, growing 55% last year to $2.9 billion. The fiscal quarter since then turned out even better for automotive, with 61% YoY growth delivering quarterly revenues of $961 million. Beyond that, Qualcomm has a massive pipeline of business in place with automakers — probably north of $50 billion at this point. Growth in IoT has been slightly more modest, at 22% YoY for fiscal 2024 and 36% for the most recent quarter. (Plenty of good companies would love it if any part of their business grew at 22% per year, let alone 36%.)

Qualcomm continues to press ahead on the automotive front. In advance of MWC, it announced the Qualcomm QCA6797AQ, which it touts as the industry’s first automotive-grade Wi-Fi 7 access point. With 320-megahertz channel bandwidth, this solution should improve the reliability and capacity of Wi-Fi links while reducing latency. Motorists will benefit from this when their cars do a better job of handling data-intensive applications for high-resolution mapping and other functions. Meanwhile, automakers and fleet service providers appreciate connectivity improvements that make it easier to deliver value-added services — which bring with them important opportunities for recurring revenue. Wi-Fi 7 also makes it significantly faster to deliver software updates, which is only going to get more important in this new era of software-defined vehicles.

At MWC, Qualcomm is putting even more focus on IoT. The company has announced three new RF solutions for IoT under the Dragonwing brand. My colleague Bill Curtis, who’s an expert in IIoT, had this to say about the rebranding: “Umbrella branding typically signifies portfolio alignment, focused innovation and unified messaging. Edge AI is a forcing function driving commonality across Qualcomm’s industrial portfolio, so this move makes perfect sense.”

I’m prone to agree with him. Introducing this new brand demonstrates how Qualcomm is doubling down on IoT. The pieces have all been there, but this move brings everything together in a way that should appeal to enterprise customers across many different field applications, from smart meters to healthcare devices to retail point-of-sale systems to fleet management. These devices are made to operate at ultra-low power, and they include an industry-first integrated SIM, which allows them to be programmed when they’re built or when they’re installed so they can operate across many different cellular networks worldwide.

It’s clever technology that should make it easy for customers in a wide range of sectors to say yes to bigger implementations of IoT. This plays into other important trends for bringing IoT-generated data into ERP systems and, crucially, into custom AI models that could generate great insights for the organizations that learn to harness them. And if industrial and enterprise IoT is as successful as automotive has been for Qualcomm, it could be the next big growth engine for the company and live up to the long-range forecasts from Investor Day.

Putting AI Everywhere — In The Real World And In Qualcomm’s Portfolio...And speaking of growth, no big tech marketing push would be complete these days without serious emphasis on AI. In the briefing last week, Contreras framed the company’s inherent advantages in AI succinctly: “We at Qualcomm are strategically positioned to lead and capitalize on the transition from AI training to large-scale inference, particularly as the center of mass of inference processing is moving to the edge and towards devices.”

While model training will continue to happen mostly in big datacenters (especially at the hyperscalers), inferencing is already moving out to the edge of the network and to individual devices like AI PCs. Going forward, we can expect more AI workloads to either be hybrid, with some of the work happening in the cloud and some on-device, or else on-device in toto. It is very much by design that this is another area where connectivity is crucial, and it’s no coincidence that Snapdragon processors were in every single model in the first wave of Copilot+ PCs that debuted in the summer of 2024. Qualcomm has positioned itself very shrewdly to take advantage of this moment — but the strategy goes far beyond the moment.

Unsurprisingly, AI has been a pervasive theme at the Qualcomm MWC booth, as well as in the portfolio announcements the company has been making. The centerpiece of this came last week when Qualcomm announced its AI collaboration with IBM. This involves a number of steps to increase the two companies’ coordination of enterprise-grade AI for the cloud and edge. For example, IBM’s Granite 3.1 models are now available on the Qualcomm AI Hub, ready for developers to use them on Qualcomm platforms to build enterprise AI applications. And watsonx.governance is being integrated into the Qualcomm AI Inference Suite to help enterprise customers manage AI responsibly and securely.

At MWC, Qualcomm is demoing on-device AI experiences for smartphones, PCs and smart glasses equipped with Snapdragon chips. Contreras made the point that the much-improved small AI models available today are delivering on-device capabilities “akin to what was possible only in the cloud a few months or a year ago.” This is naturally opening up all sorts of new multimodal use cases — including agentic ones — across music, navigation, weather, messaging and other functions.

Getting back to the 5G carrier solutions discussed at the top of this article, Qualcomm is also designing devices that can use AI to help improve the performance of wireless networks. For instance, its new data traffic engine uses AI to identify and dynamically prioritize different types of network traffic. The company says this can help provide lower latency for gaming, smoother voice and video calls, better Wi-Fi stability and so on. Other devices can help the network bring AI functionality to settings where it wasn’t available before, for example by processing a video stream from an ordinary security camera with AI to identify known and unknown people on the property. And I’m sure that if I listed fifteen more example use cases, we’d still just be scraping the surface of what’s possible, either today or very soon.

Qualcomm Seems To Be Accelerating As It Enters Its Fifth Decade...This year marks the 40th anniversary of Qualcomm, and if anything it seems to be picking up steam. Contreras talked about connectivity as “the oxygen that brings our digital experiences to life,” and Qualcomm has invested enormous time, money and attention into delivering that oxygen. With the Dragonwing brand, it clarifying its intent to deliver connectivity to industrial and telecom customers as well as consumers, across a broadening set of market segments and use cases.

There’s no end in sight for the growth of mobile data consumption — which, to use a statistic that Contreras cited, approximately doubled in the U.S. between 2021 and 2023. That trend is bound to continue, and it could even accelerate as smart IoT devices become more pervasive.

Qualcomm is poised to take advantage of all of this. With the moves it’s making at MWC, it seems more intent than ever on doing so. The doubters said Qualcomm could never get traction in automotive behind the modem; they said it could never field a competitive PC platform; they said the company would never be a force in RF. While the path will be difficult and there is a lot more work to be done, my money is on Qualcomm becoming a player in the industrial space.

by Patrick Moorhead