Juho Sarvikas has been confirmed as chipmaker Qualcomm’s new VP and President of North America.
Jim Cathey, the SVP and President of Qualcomm Global Business, revealed the move in a tweet earlier this week, writing, “Welcome & congratulations @sarvikas VP & President, North America @Qualcomm we are incredibly glad that you chose to join our team. Here’s to an exciting next chapter with #teamqualcomm.”
Sarvikas most recently had served as the Chief Product Officer for HMD Global, the mobile phone manufacturer created from the mobile phone business that Nokia sold to Microsoft in 2014, then bought back in 2016. He spent over 15 years at Nokia and HMD Global and announced his departure from the company in late March 2021.
He responded to Cathey’s tweet, “Thank you Jim. Honored, humbled, and energized! I'm really excited and look forward to joining the amazing #teamQualcomm.”
This time with HMD and Nokia means that Sarvikas possesses deep consumer product experience, which could potentially help inform Qualcomm on trends in smartphone design and allow the company to better adapt its chipsets for manufacturers’ needs. In the last few years Qualcomm’s dominance has come under pressure from smartphone makers who have pursued their own smartphone chips, like Apple, which has pursued its own 5G chips and Google which is expected to ship its Pixel 6 with its own custom "Whitechapel" system on a chip instead of a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip.
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