With Qualcomm in Play, San Diego Fears Losing ‘Our Flag’<br />Irwin Jacobs, a co-founder of the company and its original chief executive, is a prolific philanthropist whose name is on the engineering school<br />and the medical center of the University of California, San Diego, along with a food bank, a music center, a contemporary art museum and a playhouse.<br />SAN DIEGO — For corporate success, no story in San Diego is as good as the story of Qualcomm.<br />With 13,000 local employees whose salaries average about $105,000, Qualcomm generates about $7.4 billion, or 3.6 percent, of the<br />region’s annual economic output, according to Kelly Cunningham, a principal with the San Diego Institute for Economic Research.<br />“As a businessperson in San Diego, if you’re not following this you’re living in a cave,”<br />said Jason Hughes, chief executive of Hughes Marino, a commercial real estate brokerage.<br />And while there is no reason to think a new owner would pull out of the area altogether, Qualcomm would almost certainly see big cuts — prospectively $3 billion<br />a year, or more than 10 percent — across the company, said Stacy Rasgon, a longtime analyst of the semiconductor industry at Sanford C. Bernstein.<br />For each job the company generates, the city gets almost two<br />and a half more out of the indirect economic effects, according to a 2013 report from the San Diego Workforce Partnership.<br />The company was founded in a living room and became the world’s largest maker of smartphone<br />chips, one of the area’s largest employers and its chief corporate benefactor.<br />Last fall, Broadcom, a rival chip maker, offered to buy the company in a $105 billion deal that would be the largest technology buyout in history.
