The world is going mobile at a faster rate than most technology companies ever expected, Skyworks Solutions CEO Liam Griffin told CNBC on Thursday.
“We never anticipated what mobile was going to do for this world, for this economy,” Griffin said in an exclusive interview with “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer. “So what’s happened, by virtue of all of this excitement and this data and the commerce that’s being transmitted, we’ve created a very, very crowded network. Spectrum today is really in a digital traffic jam.”
“Spectrum” refers to the electromagnetic spectrum that telecommunications companies use to transmit mobile signals. Companies like Verizon license parts of the spectrum from the government and use them to run 3G and 4G broadband networks.
But Griffin argued that 3G and 4G soon won’t be enough to handle the number of mobile users in the world.
“5G is going to solve this. It’s going to be a brand new network,” the CEO said. “If you look at the five billion mobile subscribers that are walking around this earth today, and two billion without a phone … the five billion 3G and 4G users will upgrade to 5G. New frequencies, new filtering, new technology for us. So all of that is forward-looking.”
Griffin said that when 4G networks were first created, they seemed to be strong enough. But as companies started competing for data from the world’s ever-growing number of smartphone users, it became clear that mobile growth was not going anywhere but up.
“I think the cell phone market is incredibly healthy and it’s really about the data, this mobile internet economy … It’s incredible. It’s what we do [at] work, how we play, how we educate, how we interact socially. That’s not changing,” he told Cramer.
And with consumer tech giants Apple, Huawei and Alphabet’s Google on its list of clients, Skyworks, which manufactures semiconductor chips for smartphones, among other devices, is in a favorable position, Griffin said.
“If you look at the top five companies in the S&P 500 today, it’s Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook and Microsoft, all mobile companies. All mobile-centric companies,” the CEO told Cramer. “Mobile growth [is] really the catalyst behind what we do, and that forces companies like Skyworks to develop more creative engines to make that mobility happen.”
Disclosure: Cramer’s charitable trust owns shares of Apple, Alphabet and Facebook.
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Source: Tech CNBC
Skyworks Solutions CEO: '5G is going to solve' the world's 'digital traffic jam'