The Secret Behind Qualcomm's Margins? Patents
blog.withedge.com
blog.withedge.com
Motorola makes 18% [https://valustox.com/MSI]
Broadcom, Nvidia, and even Texas Instruments are around 40%! [https://valustox.com/AVGO, https://valustox.com/NVDA, https://valustox.com/TXN].
Intel and AMD bring up the rear with 1.8% and 0.5%. [https://valustox.com/INTC, https://valustox.com/AMD]
For reference, Apple is at 25% and Tesla is at 11%. https://valustox.com/AAPL, https://valustox.com/TSLA]
But all those factories have to be paid for no matter income.
So if income goes down your profit margin goes to terrible.
Through TSMC for example has margin >40%. Which isn't that surprising I mean there is not much competition. Intel doesn't (yet) provide their capabilities to anyone else, and the other competition is behind enough to not be an option for many things, especially high end and/or high efficiency.
What is quite fascinating is that while TSMC is a close to monopoly(/duopoly if you count Intel) in many sectors and takes advantage of it they seem to have successfully resisted the common problem of such companies stopping/slowing innovation and similar problem. I'm not sure if it's related to the additional pressure of them being on of the main lifelines for Taiwan or if they have just pretty good management or if it's because they still competition oligopoly main customers do push them to do so.
Also, TSMC hasn't been around long enough to become the slow behemoths that other big monopolies have become.
And Intel was a company that was still shoving billions into r&d, yet still got stuck
So much of the tech industry has Moore's law baked into the supply chain forecasts, so lots of incentive to deliver on it.
It makes a big difference to a few competitive customers so TSMC gets paid well for that first mover advantage, but yeah it’s not well secured monopoly.
ASML tech is a tool, one essential for new better chips but not sufficient
You also need to have a lot of know how about how to best use the tool, integrate it in workflows etc. where TSMC seems to be somehow ahead of Intel.
Additionally the custom tooling in the steps leading up to the use of ASML tooling are also hugely important and TSMC is quite a bit ahead of intel with that. It turned out having multiple different customers with different needs which all collaborate with TSMC to optimize the tools in their workflows.
Intel has been burning their cash to try and catch up in both Foundry and CPU business.
Probably better if those % were Non-GAAP numbers. But that is another debate.
They’ve been betting the farm on delivering the highest performance chips on the market for the last 25 years.
For many years, they were unopposed technically. Now, though, their technological advantage is starting to erode.
Intel is in deep shit as a business. How much runway they have is anyone’s guess. But they’re in trouble.
Rule 1: Margins are as large as a company can get away with them being
Rule 2: The primary thing that brings down prices (thereby shifting consumer demand) is another company competing offering lower prices
Rule 3: Fewer companies are able to maintain a unified front of higher-than-required margins for longer, owing to fewer individuals needing to agree to make the prsioner's-dilemma-esque status quo hold. Any one of them can take business from the others by lowering their prices, but at the cost of reduced margins for everyone (including themselves).
Margin pricing in general is "sticky". When it goes down, its difficult for it to rise. That's why companies jump on inflation as an excuse to raise prices - usually much more than inflation. Similarly, see power prices in Europe after ukraine war - record profits despite attributing price rise to rising supply chain costs.
Yes, this doesn't follow your economics 101. This is economics 102.
As soon as there is an "excuse", companies make massive profits and margins rise. This will also cut into demand as price-sensitive consumers drop out. This is seen as fine. Sometimes, it is better to make more money from less work than grow less efficiently.
And the decreasing return, in practical terms, for their customer base when upgrading since most basic computation tasks have long been solved and it's only exotic high-end workloads (plus constant bloat scaling factor that is largely a consequence of the added performance, rather than it's target) that benefit from added performance.
In short, was Intel making percent, or even single digit margins back in the 80s or even early '90s?
For Intel, it looks like they kept one dollar out of every four until the recent crash. I don't know the reason for the decline, but I know I wouldn't want to compete against Apple.
The other bit that blows me away is that sometimes it feels like Qualcomm's perpetual inability to integrate chips is a vast submarine point no one using Qualcomm sees coming, but which forever works out in Qualcomm's favor. I don't know how many chips a MediaTek cellular modem takes, but iPhone 15 pro has 6+ chips dedicated to cellular, probably more. Modem, two transceivers, an envelope tracker, and probably a bunch of in this case non-qualcomm power supplies but most probably use Qualcomm pmics, maybe plural. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+15+Pro+Max+Chip+ID/16532... . There's also separate but non-Qualcomm solutions for wifi & bt too, where-as again I rather expect a company like MediaTek has much more working together.
I'm really interested to see chip identifications of the upcoming desktop/server class Qualcomm Oryon, supposedly by the Nuvia team (one of the strongest possible cases for anti-trust I have ever seen). https://www.semiaccurate.com/2023/09/26/whats-going-on-with-... is not partial journalism, but this cavalcade of ridiculousness is entirely the sort of poorly integrated Qualcomm solution I'd expect, that both builds terrible terrible products but which also lets Qualcomm fail upwards by requiring 5x more board components than is reasonable. Terrible for consumers, OEMs are in tears, but oh sorry, your design is late hot over priced and seemed reasonable but you're going to have to add a bunch more pmic's to get to market because we are Qualcomm and we spend more on lawyers than design.
This is an interesting turn of phrase, but I don't understand what it means - are you able to explain? (Google is not helping)
The 20% margin this year was an anomaly. It’s usually closer to 29%+
The last thing this world needs is more Qualcomm. I'd rather see the entire patent system go down in flames than this utter crap continuing.
Qualcomm has been a vampire on technology for years now, it's time for this company to end once and for all. We have to get technology under the people's control again - it is ridiculous and stifling progress that governments legally prescribe standards that are not open to everyone to implement. And especially it's ridiculous how few notable manufacturers of mobile phone SoCs remain - it's either Qualcomm or Mediatek.
Standards-essential patents are required to be licensed this way. It's called "RAND licensing": reasonable and non-discriminatory. Everyone who participates in, say, ISO or the ITU, is required to fill out a form documenting if they own part of the standard and what terms they agree to license it on. If they refuse RAND licensing, their inventions get ripped out of the standard[0].
What you want is royalty-free RAND licensing. There are a few standards bodies that insist on royalty-free licensing, notably the W3C[1] and Khronos Group[2], but it's uncommon. Most standards bodies are in fields of endeavor that don't actually require free redistribution - in fact, they don't want it. They pay the people doing research for the standards on a "for exposure" basis[3]: they get their patented inventions in the standard, and as payment for their work, they get to charge a $2/unit royalty on every user, which they can then pour into research that yields more patents.
I'm going to be honest, royalty-bearing RAND (as in, pay up or don't implement) is probably the right fit for a lot of industries. We hate it because it steps on our (FOSS) toes, and if we can develop the software as a community, why can't we invent the underlying technology too? This is the idea behind royalty-free video codecs like AV1 - it turns out a community of amateurs can do video codec research after all[4]. But at the same time, cellular radio technology is quite possibly the worst thing to leave to amateur[5] software development. There's a lot of very expensive lab tests you need to do to make sure the technology works, to ensure hundreds of devices can communicate with the towers without jamming each other, and to ensure each one of those devices isn't pumping the user with shittons of radiation. There's a lot of boring research and regulation needed to make radio work at all, it's not something that can be hacked together in a weekend and collaborated on over time.
The real problem with RAND is that a lot of the licensing bodies that require it don't actually enforce that requirement all that well. For example, 4G and 5G cellular technology has a RAND requirement. If you want to put a 5G modem in a cellphone, there's a defined fee structure you pay that's the same deal everyone else gets. BUT, if you want to put a 5G modem in a laptop, that's not covered by the RAND promise, so Qualcomm reserves the right to charge whatever price it wants to each individual licensee, or even just not license it. This is why laptops with cellular modems in them are rare[6] and hideously expensive.
[0] For the record, most standards bodies do NOT have a means to do this to people who refuse royalty-free licensing, which is why ISO has failed to create a royalty-free video standard. Every time they try someone says "I own this, here's your royalty bearing RAND license", and the standard is dead in the water. In fact, not only did they fail to make the standard, they kicked Leonardo Chiariglione, co-founder of MPEG, out of MPEG for making too much of a fuss about it.
[1] Specifically as a reaction to the University of Minnesota trying to charge licensing fees for Gopher
[2] Which has resulted in a number of "ubiquitous" OpenGL extensions that aren't in the standard solely because they cost money to license, but can be accessed through de-facto standard extension names
[3] https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solu...
[4] To be more accurate, AOM AV1 was only partially done by the community. Xiph.org contributed their work on Daala, but Google also included what would have become VP10. So there's still a lot of Google monopoly money in there. Furthermore, there's at least two companies claiming patent ownership on AV1 anyway, but I've yet to hear of any enforcement actions.
[5] Amateur as in ham radio, not amateur as in unskilled layman
[6] Apple doesn't sell a laptop with a cellular modem in it, and why the only Surface tablet Microsoft sells is the Qualcomm ARM version, not the x86 version. Qualcomm wants cellular capability to be a selling point of their ARM processors, so they (refuse to) license appropriately.
However, I do disagree on some points:
> They pay the people doing research for the standards on a "for exposure" basis[3]: they get their patented inventions in the standard, and as payment for their work, they get to charge a $2/unit royalty on every user, which they can then pour into research that yields more patents.
The problem at the core IMHO is that Western nations removed themselves from R&D financing following the end of the Cold War, and instead large corporations and foreign nations moved in that had other interests in mind than the common good.
> Every time they try someone says "I own this, here's your royalty bearing RAND license", and the standard is dead in the water.
There used to be at least three competing patent pools for h264 and HEVC (until Velos Media disbanded). That even the largest commercial standardization enterprises like MPEG could not make sure that there was at least exactly one consolidated license shop just shows to me how nuts the entire patent situation has become.
> But at the same time, cellular radio technology is quite possibly the worst thing to leave to amateur[5] software development. There's a lot of very expensive lab tests you need to do to make sure the technology works, to ensure hundreds of devices can communicate with the towers without jamming each other, and to ensure each one of those devices isn't pumping the user with shittons of radiation. There's a lot of boring research and regulation needed to make radio work at all, it's not something that can be hacked together in a weekend and collaborated on over time.
Actually it can. Fabrice Bellard (yes, the same person as ffmpeg and qemu...) wrote an entire 4G/5G tower implementation that he currently sells via his own company, there's a FOSS project implementing the core services for a 5G network [2] and I think Osmocom has also made some progress in getting some sort of client side support.
Yes, the interop and jamming concerns are still valid, but those with enough brains to work in this field in the first place generally tend to know WTF they're doing - and commercial efforts definitely have the resources to properly work without endangering anyone.
The telling thing for me is that there is virtually only Qualcomm and Mediatek around who sell high performance modems, in addition to Samsung who mostly keep their stuff reserved for their own phones. Where's Apple? Where's Broadcom? Where's anyone to compete with Qualcomm's extortion tactics and Mediatek's IMHO embarassing code quality (just look at one of their Android BSP packages and the kernel patches they do)? For me, this state of the market shows that there is something seriously broken, and given that Apple has more cash on hand than entire countries' GDP and some of the most capable semiconductor engineers in the world managing to kick the arses of behemoths like Intel, the only explanation is the patent minefield.
And I'd like to address this as well:
> Which has resulted in a number of "ubiquitous" OpenGL extensions that aren't in the standard solely because they cost money to license, but can be accessed through de-facto standard extension names
Yet another very fine example how the patent system that was supposed to further innovation actually stifles it.
The system is completely broken.
Even the mega giant Apple is reportedly just giving up on trying. And at huge real world impact, as well as market drive. Apple designs tend to use a third or more of their phone motherboard's real estate supporting Qualcomm's forest of different parts required for cellular. It's been stubbornly hard to integrate well, forever.
The other IT field I'd cite is GPUs, where it's not at all a secret that companies would love to make more open hardware & stop using so many firmware blobs, but those blobs are the obfuscation layer that gets them legal protection, by making it unclear how the hardware works.
In these regards, it's just a miracle wifi and bluetooth and consumer GPUs exist. That anyone can build any chips, given our shitty onerous forsaken legal IP system, seems like a miracle. Qualcomm feels like the dark world hell nightmare we can never escape from but miraculously nightmare-shit-world is in only one key part of information technology, not all of IT. Somehow. Thank the stars.
Beyond a value assessment, if you look at who licenses whose patents, it's MediaTek paying handsomely to license a ton of Qualcomm patents. That happened in November 2009. I wonder how many new patents MediaTek has had to license to keep going, versus how many they're 3/4 of the way to done having to license.
I truly like your point! I think a reversal of perspective is totally due here. But so far, MediaTek has been winning marketshare imho by playing a hella competitive game, where-as Qualcomm seems to be ultra expensive chips that consistently under-deliver on their promises. MediaTek also seems to be available in a wider range of systems, where-as Qualcomm chips seem to only be available on a very limited range of products. I wish Qualcomm was at least more competitive; the 8cx series could have been a value chip, but was hot and systems were still far too expensive.
Sure, they will have released 11G, and all of the ads will tell me how vital it is the government can track me with millimeter precision, but I think all of my needs were already met with a five+ year old device.
It's pretty interesting seeing some plateau forming commercially. The new Intel n100 - n30p chips look awesome. But they compete with mini-pc systems built around 20-65W desktop chips from 3-10 years ago that have a huge cheap second hand market. And they are a bit more power efficient but not vastly, producing similar power. But, good news, Intel & oems can have new systems using these chips on the market for competitive prices. Being able to compete with your own secondary market is a great sign to me.
This is why Apple has been so successful with Apple Silicon: Apple is able to capture way more of the value created with Apple devices, which is why they're able to invest more in chips then Intel/AMD and yes, even Qualcomm.
[1] price difference between an mac mini 256GB vs 512GB: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini/apple-m2-chip-wi...
- So much of that wall of patents was undergrad level CS concepts with ", for mobile device" tacked on the end. Paraphrasing, don't sue me (kidding..), but that was the gist of it.
- Their actual development process was pretty bad. I submitted a bug fix within the first few weeks I was there. Due to their CI process being entirely manual and very broken I was informed nearly a year later that my fix did not work. This tied in pretty well with my department being told they had a "budget"[1] of lines of code they could change and that budget being pretty limited.
Overall I left with an impression that they were mostly there to license very old technology and make money from patents. Maybe their hardware team was better, I couldn't say.
[1] Most of the effort of our team was spent debugging crash dumps determined to be in "our" part of the code. Nearly all of these were caused by other teams calling into an API we maintained with a null function pointer that "our" code would call. When I asked if we could refactor the API to return an error code if the function pointer was null I learned about the "code budget" and how it would cost too much to refactor.
One of our sales guys was working with a now-famous brewery & they were interested in a mobile friendly store locator since they had far less distribution back then. I tossed together a basic PoC using a crude geolocation system which worked well enough and we were thinking it might be worth trying. A while later they started to respond to our questions on pricing – which started at $50k per carrier for the privilege of being offered for sale, plus over half of the sale price, and that was the floor: they wanted to see the corporate balance sheet so they could decide on an acceptable percentage of their TOTAL revenue, even if most of it had nothing to do with mobile sales. Everyone said “haha, no!”, and dropped it.
Seems like the message behind 'this is core to our business' is easily communicated with financial incentives backing that up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_Stadium
But I get it that in sports, sometimes the big cheques are written because you can.
Surprisingly cheap! Not that I think it is a good use of money, but less ostentatious than I expected.
> "...like other semiconductor majors, the San Diego-based company also protects its inventions with intellectual property. But Qualcomm has a unique model at the heart of the way it uses those patents"
The article dives into that model.
In fact you need deep pockets to litigate, and you get ~zero protection until that is done save threatening C&D letters. Most patents are garbage (eg. clear prior art exists, they are obvious and non-inventive, or they are poorly structured and easily sidestepped - but make the governments and lawyers money) and most alleged infractions are settled out of court (possibly largely because most patents are garbage, but invalidating their claims in court costs too much money).
In the recent words of a prominent university law professor, "IP law is the field of law in which I have witnessed the most inconsistent results during my career" ... ie. great firms sometimes yield crap results, and crap firms sometimes yield great results - it's a relative shit show.
In an ideal world it would be great to see either a deconstructed patent system or a revised patent system with lower fees, more boolean logic, less jurisdiction-specific human language verbiage, and a more structured character to the claims and description text. Realistically, that isn't going to happen because vast investments in the status quo exist.
(Source: Spoke with four IP law firms across two countries and some prominent law professors in the last month, currently spending ~100% time on patent theory, drafting and review - 'tis the season to be lawyery!)
You may say it limits innovation. But it also protects smaller players from investing in innovation, by de-risking that a big customer might copy them and destroy their business. Which is mostly this scenario.
I think the bigger problem with the patent system is the patent trolls. Please someone solve that problem.
The only sector that could plausibly justify patents is biotech... but even there, the vast majority of early R&D is publicly-funded, and thus should negate protection.
A Government-mandated monopoly on ideas may have made sense at some point, but it's antiquated today. Today they serve to stifle innovation, extract rent and act as yet another form of regulatory capture -- e.g. when they become standards.
(Coming from someone who has 20+ patents to their name.)
You can be tripped over by patents you don't even know existed in unrelated fields, owned by people who didnt even work with the patent. So stupid.
So if you could back this up with some links, it'd be appreciated. Otherwise it's just an urban myth.
this one is not "confirmed." It's "plausible."
There are some, but it's nowhere near universal.
Google and Samsung sign global patent cross-license deal
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/01/google-and-samsung-s...
Google and Tencent agree to cross-license patents
https://www.ft.com/content/0a1b904d-77f9-3b48-885d-0c2693a6d...
SAP and Google Cozy Up With Wide-Reaching Patent Deal: The Potential Implications
https://www.constellationr.com/blog-news/insights/sap-and-go...
Google and Cisco Enter Into Patent Cross-Licensing Agreement
https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2014/m02/go...
Tencent is from 5 years ago, and it gives no details on how many patents are involved.
SAP is from 9 years ago.
Cisco is 9 years ago as well. I was in Legal for that one. It took months of negotiating.
Note there is no cross-licensing deal with Apple, Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, or Amazon.
Google literally bought Motorola for their patent portfolio -- or at least, that's the only "asset" they retained when divesting of the company years later. And I readily admit: Google is a "be less evil" player in this respect. (But not all: See wage fixing collusion verdicts.)
At some point, we have to acknowledge that patents are pursued purely in the spirit of mutually-assured destruction from other litigious players. This manifests as a tax on everyone -- the only people that win are attorneys.
the claim was "they cross-license." As I said if you read, the myth is "plausible" but not "confirmed."
yes, there are some cross-licenses. No, they are not universal. I gave examples of obvious ones that nevertheless don't exist.
On Motorola: I'm afraid I have to claim superior knowledge on that one. At the time, Google was actually hiring patent acquisition people, and in fact, I was interviewing them. They probably fell for the myth that you fell for.
They stopped that pretty quickly, when it became clear that most of Motorola's patents were worthless. I've looked them over myself. They were worth less than nothing: it meant that suits against Motorola now had to be defended. In other words, it was a big mistake that they undid.
So you can't implement 5G without their patents. Add that to encouraging complexity (10,000+ pages of spec to do something outwardly similar to WiFi), and they have a really effective moat around an "open" standard.
The entire protocol space is somewhat arbitrary. This is a bit like patenting a strategy in a board game you created, and that everyone is required to play.
What do you mean by open standard? I don't think 5G is patent-free by any means, nor is 802.11/Wi-Fi for that matter!
That's just how most hardware standards are developed, as far as I know. The best thing you can hope for is a consortium maintaining a FRAND patent pool, like for the MPEG family of codecs (and even there you can't be sure that there aren't any patent trolls lurking outside the pool).
Also, we don't need patents for innovation; just look at Open Source for a good example why. Stuff will be invented anyway, patents or no patents.
The more I look at the small innovators, they are all hungry to improve upon things the big companies are sitting on for 20+ years with a big moat to protect them, and I really get to thinking that in aggregate we are doing more harm than good.
A response I hear is "then no one would invest" and I think that's false. The investment landscape would change from a small number of big investments to a larger number of smaller investments - investing in tooling to help you beat the competition next year, but not necessarily giving you a 10 year investment for your big dream. And I think that's fine - people still want to innovate and the market already rewards innovators. It is not clear to me that government mandated restrictions on innovation are a good idea at all, and none of the common talking points really engage with the facts as I see them.
Take a look at FDM 3D printers. They went from $50k to $25k in the 13 years they were for sale and under patent protection, and then 10 years after patent protection ended they were $250 and sold by a wide variety of companies all over the world.
How many of today's patented goods could be made for 100x cheaper without patents and what is the cumulative effect of manufacturing machinery, medical equipment, washing machines, computers, and more being 100x cheaper? Is our world really better without that?
People don't invest because of first mover disadvantage in game theory.
Anything by William B. Bonvlian
Vitamin D fortification is a fun one, involved the creation of WARF in madison and proceeded Bayh Dole.
If I had to guess, I'd guess that Qualcomm's patents over stuff like Wi-Fi and CDMA were probably more harmful than beneficial, but I'd love to know how one would analyze that.
Who is the "smaller player" in this scenario? $150 billion QCOM?
This is almost a no true scotsman argument.
The patent trolls are a direct result of incentives the patent system creates, getting rid of them necessarily involves seriously reforming the system.
> Our use of open source software may harm our business.
> Certain of our software and our suppliers’ software may contain or may be derived from “open source” software, and we have seen, and believe that we will continue to see, customers request that we develop products, including software associated with our integrated circuit products, that incorporate open source software elements and operate in an open source environment, which, under certain open source licenses, may offer accessibility to a portion of our products’ source code and may expose our related intellectual property to adverse licensing conditions. Licensing of such software may impose certain obligations on us if we were to distribute derivative works of that software. For example, these obligations may require us to make source code for the derivative works available to our customers in a manner that allows them to make such source code available to their customers or license such derivative works under a particular type of license that is different than what we customarily use to license our software. Furthermore, in the course of product development, we may make contributions to third-party open source projects that could subject our intellectual property to adverse licensing conditions. For example, to encourage the growth of a software ecosystem that is interoperable with our products, we may need to contribute certain implementations under the open source licensing terms that govern such projects, which may adversely impact our associated intellectual property. Developing open source products, while adequately protecting the intellectual property upon which our licensing programs depends, may prove burdensome and time-consuming under certain circumstances, thereby placing us at a competitive disadvantage, and we may not adequately protect our intellectual property. Also, our use and our customers’ use of open source software may subject our products and our customers’ products to governmental and third-party scrutiny and delays in product certification, which could cause customers to view our products as less desirable than our competitors’ products.
https://investor.qualcomm.com/financial-information/sec-fili...
https://web.archive.org/web/20230921012336/https://investor....
Why? Strategically, you don't want those drug people as enemies. They have an extremely powerful lobby in D.C. and many "reforms" that make sense in software would get them up in arms. Choose your battles.
>Strategically, you don't want those drug people as enemies.
Oh, actually, yes, can we please ream the m*****f*****s already? To talk about a group of people like that, suggests that they wield far too much power. It gets worse when you learn about what they actually do. Enough already.
An "extremely powerful lobby" is not so scary when you outlaw the type of corporate lobbying they engage in. And the American people don't have to let you have a business.
I'm not averse to looking at alternative models for providing revenue to the drug discovery and testing infrastructure (the current model of patents is flawed as hell), but if you like new medications like the COVID vaccines then you have to respect the important of protecting the incentive to create them.
I don't believe that, but I won't convince you. Instead, I invite you to try to convince yourself. Imagine a world where drug discovery happens without patents. Talk it out, falsify your propositions as you go, see if you can come up with something workable.
"Remove the drug patent system" = Upset Kanye
"Replace the drug patent system with a new way to encourage drug discovery besides the honor system" = Smiling Kanye
>People who can't afford existing drugs
>People who can't get corporations to develop drugs for their conditions because they wouldn't be "profitable"
>People who can't make their farm's business model work even though they're fully capable of growing the crops people want and getting them to market
and so on. But thank you for being my daily encounter with Better Things Aren't Possible Guy.
Face the reality that the status quo is unsustainable. Throw off your wishful thinking that things can go on like this without repercussion.
If you substantially screwed with that without a very careful and thorough knowledge of the consequences, drug discovery could grind to a halt.
Remember, this is an industry that's more than happy to just stop making drugs and let all the sufferers die if it's not profitable enough.
and now they are taking a different literal anticoagulant as anticoagulant.
w00t!
Quick question- will a massive dose of apixaban kill a rat the same as a massive dose of an anticoagulant will?
mRNA's are novel, on this we can agree, and I have no issue with their use.
Other sectors of the drug market are less novel and more about slightly different for the purposes of starting the clock on drug copyrights and licencing again.
I don't really have a good alternative though.