During its CES press conference today, Qualcomm, a semiconductor company, announced partnerships with Walgreens and Novartis to use its 2net wireless health platform.

The San Diego-based company’s president, Derek Arberle, also spent a chunk of time discussing its previously announced Snapdragon 810 chip making its debut in the new LG G Flex 2 today, which will include support for 4K video and high-resolution gaming content.

Other topics included wearables — Qualcomm here hit several times on the idea that it is working with products that are actually shipping, unlike some other firms that it somehow failed to name directly — and the automotive space.

Broadly, in whatever physical goods we will see increasing connectivity, and baked-in computing power, Qualcomm wants to build the chips to handle the work.

The company’s last reported quarterly earnings showed less profit than investors expected, sending its shares down sharply. The company went public in 1991.

Qualcomm’s Arberle cited an interesting statistic, noting that in the eyes of some analysts, 8 billion smartphones will ship between 2014 and 2018. The number matters, as it indicates that what could be the core engine of revenue growth for Qualcomm has headroom — I doubt that many people expect wearables and other gadget niches that the company is working on to provide similarly material top line.

Hitting on that concept, Arberle noted that chips from his company are now in “more than a billion” Android handsets. In its recently concluded fiscal 2014, it shipped 860 million of those chips.

Returning to healthcare, the company’s freshly announced deals with Walgreens and Novartis put it inside of two sides of health — consumer and corporate. The company did not discuss any potential financial terms of the arrangements.

By: DocMemory
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