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Good morning.
Cristiano Amon becomes the CEO of Qualcomm on June 30, and in that role will be a key global leader in the roll out of 5G technology over the next decade. I spoke with him recently about the opportunity and the challenges ahead.
“The problem to be solved with 5G,” he told me, “is to connect everyone and everything to the cloud 100% of the time with reliability.” The emphasis on “reliability” is mine, but everyone who has ever suffered a dropped phone call knows why. “For mission critical applications—production lines, remote surgery, autonomous cars—you need a reliability that never existed in wireless.” Amon says the pandemic also has created “an accelerated timeline” for the 5G roll out. “All the numbers are bigger now.”
The economic opportunity is enormous. A study by Accenture, commissioned by Qualcomm and being released this morning, finds that in the U.S. alone, 5G will generate “up to $1.5 trillion in additional GDP between 2021 and 2025” and “has the potential to create or transform up to 16 million American jobs.” (You can find the Accenture study here.)
Jobs also will be lost, of course, due to 5G-enabled automation in factories, transportation, and elsewhere. Amon says the key is to move fast—hence to talk of a global 5G race. “If you are late to 5G, there are consequences that are far bigger than what happened in the telephone sector…If you are early in the process, you have an opportunity for people to learn new skills, and for new opportunities and business models to be created. If you are late, you could be in situation where jobs are lost to technology and you also have lost the ability to create the jobs of the future.”
Bottom line: Amon says we need a national push, with collaboration between business and government. “All the carriers have aggressive roll out plans, but I would argue we need to go faster, especially when we think about what’s happening in China.” Like many others in the business community, he is hoping for the Biden administration to move quickly beyond COVID relief efforts and focus on infrastructure. “We need to accelerate the build out of nationwide 5G infrastructure, including accelerating the ability to build out infrastructure that otherwise would not be economic.”
More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
Boeing 777
Boeing has told airlines to ground some of its wide-body 777s, following the mid-flight failure of an engine near Denver. The recommendation affects 128 of the 777 models that have Pratt & Whitney 4000-series engines, and is intended to allow their inspection by regulators. Many of the grounded planes weren't flying anyway, due to the pandemic. Wall Street Journal
Google ethicists
Google has fired another one of its A.I. ethics researchers: Margaret Mitchell's ouster follows that of her co-lead, Timnit Gebru, a few months ago (though Google claims Gebru resigned rather than being fired). The company says Mitchell, a labor activist, removed "confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees" from the company's internal computer networks. Fortune
Big Tech
Google and Amazon will be subjected to antitrust investigations by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority in the coming months. The watchdog will gain a dedicated Big Tech unit later this year, but, says chief executive Andrea Coscelli, "until we have these new legal powers, if we want to achieve impact for consumers in the U.K., we need to use our current [tools]." Financial Times
Vaccine production
The Serum Institute of India will prioritize India itself before making more vaccines for the rest of the world. That's a big deal, because the Serum Institute is one of the world's biggest vaccine manufacturers, and its output (it has a licensing deal with AstraZeneca) is critical for developing economies during the pandemic. Fortune
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Myanmar stand
Businesses have to take a stance on the military coup in Myanmar, write The B Team's Sharan Burrow and Paul Polman in a piece for Fortune: "The events in Myanmar must serve as a turning point for how responsible business reacts in times of acute political crisis. Principled corporate leaders can meaningfully move forward by implementing human rights and environmental due diligence and protecting workers’ rights and democratic institutions." Fortune
Going green
Kara Hurst, Amazon's vice president of worldwide sustainability, writes in a piece for Fortune that "all companies have a role to play in ramping up their climate ambitions and [investing] in solutions to protect the economy." She touts the Amazon-led Climate Pledge, noting that "climate change is too complex and important an issue to tackle alone." Fortune
Vaccines and transmission
Fortune's Sy Mukherjee delves into the question of whether COVID-19 vaccines can stop a person from being infectious: "The ideal would be to achieve a significant level of 'sterilizing immunity,' the kind that can stop widespread community spread of the coronavirus. And the information rolling in suggests this class of vaccines may meet that challenge." Fortune
Tesla's bitcoin
Tesla has already made around $1 billion in paper profit on its $1.5 billion bitcoin investment, estimates Wedbush Securities' Daniel Ives. CNBC
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.
