 agreement with Seiko and a $125 million bidding voucher received from the FCC. Growth stunted Like many tech companies, QUALCOMM's remarkable rate of growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s temporarily came to an end as the tech bubble burst. Thousands of employees lost their jobs in 2001 through 2003, when the company slashed employee head count from a high of about 10,5000 in 2001 to 7,400 in 2003. The company's stock, which had skyrocketed, saw a steady decline in 2000 and continued to do SO until late 2003, when wireless sales began to explode around the world. As part of the cost-cutting measures the company undertook in 2000, it sold its antennae infrastructure business to Ericsson and its handset manufacturing unit to Kyocera. It didn't help matters much that the company made a bad move in November 2001, when QUALCOMM invested $266 million of equity financing in Vesper, a Brazilian CDMA wireless service provider, only to turn around in 2003 and sell the unit to Embratel Participacoes S. for an undisclosed amount after failing to turn the company around. Adding to the company's woes, in July 2000, QUALCOMM announced plans to spin off QUALCOMM Spinco, its semiconductor and systems software business, filing for a $100 million IPO at the same time. To give Spinco access to necessary 116 VAULT LIBRARY CAREER 2005 Vault Inc. Vault Guide to the Top Telecom Employers QUALCOMM Incorporated technology, QUALCOMM planned to assign some of its patents to Spinco. The move followed the spin-off of service provider Leap Wireless the year before. Spinco's spin-off didn't work out quite SO well, however. In November, QUALCOMM announced that it was pushing back the proposed offering until January, and by mid-2001 the plans had been scrapped entirely. Coming back Thanks to a solid strategy, however, in 2002 the company began to make a comeback - and in a hurry. For the fourth quarter 2002, QUALCOMM reported that revenue rose 34 percent to $874 million, while profits climbed to $190 million, versus a loss of $75 million in t