Paul E. Jacobs, who succeeded his father, founder Irwin Jacobs, as CEO of chip maker Qualcomm in 2005, “has spent the last six years expanding Qualcomm’s business beyond his father’s tight focus on the digital wireless technology known as C.D.M.A. (code division multiple access),”
the
New York Times
reported.
Such a family succession in publicly traded companies is rare; Ford Motor and Comcast come to mind. For it to succeed is rarer still.
Corporate governance specialists often disapprove of such successions. But the younger Mr. Jacobs has positioned Qualcomm, which builds chips for mobile devices, to lead the smartphone chip market as consumers increasingly do their computing in their palms and not tethered to their desks.
Cody Acree, an analyst at the Williams Financial Group, told the
Times:
“Qualcomm has been able to do the handoff from father to son that most other companies have not been able to do. Paul is an engineer who owns patents in his own right and was a brilliant technologist before moving into this position. And I think the industry as a whole respected him, knowing he was not just being given the job because it was his dad’s.”
The
Times
article said that starting in the seventh grade, Paul Jacobs worked part-time at Linkabit, another technology company his father founded. During college he worked at Qualcomm in the summers. Jacobs told the
Times:
“Another thing that my father did for me was that every summer I worked in another area of engineering, so that by the time I went to college, I had done almost every kind of engineering there was.”
(Source:
New York Times,
June 12, 2011.)
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