Key Stats for Qualcomm Stock
- 52-Week Range: $121.99 to $205.95
- Current Price: $137.52
- Street Mean Target: ~$151
- TIKR Target Price: ~$187
- Earnings Date: April 29, 2026
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What Happened?
Qualcomm is down roughly 20% in 2026, and the reasons are not hard to find. A global DRAM shortage has been squeezing mid-range Android smartphone production, and Apple is quietly moving on from Qualcomm modems.
CEO Cristiano Amon told analysts earlier this year that Qualcomm expects to supply modems for only around 20% of iPhones in 2026, and none at all by 2027. For a company that once accounted for roughly a fifth of its revenue, Apple is a meaningful headwind to absorb.
Last Friday, BNP Paribas made it official, downgrading QCOM to Neutral and cutting its price target from $180 to $120. The firm said it sees “no end in sight for smartphone woes.” It was the latest in a string of at least eight downgrades Qualcomm has absorbed this year, pushing analyst sentiment to its weakest point in nearly two decades.
That is the noise, and here is what is easy to miss underneath it. Qualcomm just posted record Q1 fiscal 2026 revenue of $12.3 billion. Automotive revenue grew 15% year over year to $1.1 billion. IoT, which covers AI laptops, industrial devices, and connected hardware, was up 9% to $1.7 billion.
Neither segment is large enough yet to fully offset smartphone pressure, but both are moving in the right direction. The question heading into April 29 earnings is how convincingly management can show that the transition is on track.
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Wall Street’s Take on QCOM
The analyst community is about as split as you will ever see on a major semiconductor name. The average price target sits around $151, but that number does very little work here because the range underneath it runs from $100 at the low end to $216 at the high end. Baird, Piper Sandler, and Rosenblatt are all solidly bullish.
BNP and Seaport are not. JP Morgan, Mizuho, and Bernstein sit somewhere in the middle, broadly acknowledging the diversification story but wanting to see it actually show up in the numbers before committing.
That spread is actually a useful context for investors. It tells you this is genuinely a judgment call right now, not a consensus name. The bears think the smartphone headwinds are worse and longer than the bulls expect.
The bulls think the market is pricing Qualcomm like a melting smartphone business and ignoring what automotive and AI edge could look like by 2028 and 2029. Both sides have a reasonable argument, which is exactly why the stock is sitting where it is.
Qualcomm Stock Financials
The top line tells a familiar semiconductor story: a big upcycle, a reset, and then a gradual rebuild. Revenue hit $44.1 billion in fiscal 2025, and consensus expects it to stay roughly flat through fiscal 2027, before climbing toward around $55 billion in fiscal 2029 and $58 billion by 2030.
EPS follows a similar arc, dipping from $12.03 in fiscal 2025 to around $11 over the next two years before recovering toward $15 and eventually $17 by the end of the decade.
The near-term flatness is real, but there is something the revenue chart does not show you. Qualcomm’s licensing business, called QTL, collects royalties on essentially every 5G device sold anywhere in the world.
That revenue keeps coming in largely regardless of whether Qualcomm wins a specific chip design. It is one of the more durable income streams in the entire semiconductor industry, and it is a big part of why operating margins have held around 34% over the past year, well above the five-year average of around 27%.
On the competitive side, MediaTek continues to chip away at Qualcomm’s share in mid-range Android phones. NVIDIA and Mobileye are legitimate rivals in automotive computing. And in AI edge PCs, where Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite has made real inroads, Intel and AMD are not standing still.
The core mobile franchise remains strong, but the new markets Qualcomm is betting on are genuinely competitive, making execution more important than ever.
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What Does the Valuation Model Say?
TIKR’s valuation model targets around $187 for QCOM, built on roughly 2% annual revenue growth through fiscal 2028, operating margins holding around 31%, and an exit P/E of around 13x. That multiple is essentially where Qualcomm has traded historically, so the model is not pricing in a re-rating. It is pricing in a business that weathers near-term headwinds and recovers on the back of automotive and IoT scaling. From the current price of $137.52, that implies around 36% total return over roughly 2.4 years, or about 13% annualized.
What Has to Go Right:
- Automotive keeps compounding. Management has pointed toward a $22 billion automotive revenue pipeline by 2029. Seeing that convert to actual revenue over the next several earnings calls is what validates the long-term model. The Q1 print of $1.1 billion at 15% growth is a reasonable start.
- The licensing business holds firm. QTL, Qualcomm’s patent licensing segment, collects royalties on 5G devices globally. If that revenue stream remains durable through the Apple transition, it will significantly cushion the earnings impact.
- AI edge PCs find their footing. Snapdragon X Elite has made real inroads in the premium PC market. If on-device AI becomes a genuine driver of laptop purchases, Qualcomm is better positioned than most people currently give it credit for.
What Could Go Wrong:
- Smartphone weakness runs longer than expected. The DRAM shortage is compressing mid-range Android demand, according to the consensus view right now. If it bleeds into 2027, the flat revenue period extends, and the earnings recovery gets pushed out.
- The Apple transition hits harder than modeled. Qualcomm has publicly assumed near-zero Apple modem revenue by 2027. If the non-Apple QCT business does not grow fast enough to absorb that, margins come under more pressure than the model assumes.
- The multiple stays are compressed. At around 13x forward earnings, Qualcomm is already cheap relative to its history. But if the diversification thesis takes longer to play out, there is no obvious catalyst to push the multiple higher in the near term.
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Should You Invest in Qualcomm?
The easy way to think about Qualcomm right now is as a business where the near-term is genuinely difficult, and the market knows it. The Apple modem exit is not a surprise, and the smartphone memory headwinds are real. The downgrades are coming from credible places.
What is less clear is whether those headwinds are already reflected in a stock that is down 20% for the year, trading near its 52-week low, and sitting at roughly 13x forward earnings.
Put Qualcomm on your TIKR watchlist. With earnings on April 29, you will get management’s latest read on automotive traction, smartphone demand, and the trajectory of the licensing business in one report. That is the moment to see whether the narrative is getting better or worse.
The TIKR valuation model gives you a framework to think about what “better” would need to look like to justify a price of $187. Whether you think that scenario is likely is where your own judgment comes in.
As always, our job at TIKR is to give you the tools to make that call yourself. Start your own analysis of Qualcomm and every other stock on your list with a free TIKR account.
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