Apple Inc. (AAPL), QUALCOMM, Inc. (QCOM) & America’s Fifth Best CEO Will Give You an Investing Edge

Once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty easy to dissect balance sheets, income, and cash flow statements. This is the first step in getting your feet wet in the investment world.

But it doesn’t stop there. If we were to base investing decisions solely on what we read in these statements, that would be akin to picking a significant other based solely on their Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) profile — to many, it just doesn’t make sense to avoid real-life interaction.

Investigating these “soft” aspects of a company is important for investors. And although we can’t capture all of the intangibles of a company in one article, Glassdoor.com — a website that collects employee sentiment for companies across the world — recently came out with a list that could help: the Top CEOs of 2013.

Over the past few days, I’ve covered CEOs 25 through 6. Today, I’m going to introduce you to the company with the 5th-highest-rated CEO, give you some background on the company, and at the end, I’ll offer access to a special free report on who is going to win the war between the five biggest tech stocks.

QUALCOMM, Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM)
For those who might be unfamiliar with Qualcomm’s business, it’s a two-headed beast that’s been performing exceptionally well.

On one hand, 60% of the company’s revenue comes from its wireless chips business. That means that it designs and manufactures chips for uses around the world. On the other hand, the company’s portfolio of patents and licensing accounts for 85% of net income before taxes.

While continued revenue from the licensees and patents will require further investment in research and development, the company’s chips are well positioned. As Fool colleague Evan Niu recently pointed out, although the company gets a lot of press for providing baseband chips for Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), it won’t meet its death if Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s upcoming earnings fail to impress, as many are expecting them to.

That’s because Samsung’s Galaxy S4 units, expected to come out this month, use both baseband and processor chips — giving investors twice the exposure to the smartphone company that presents the greatest challenge to Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) today.

But the real reason to get excited about the company is its prospects moving forward. Many of the company’s patents cover 3G technologies that make mobile access to the Internet possible. With 1 billion smartphone users worldwide, you’d think that the company had already tapped out its potential markets. But nothing could be further from the truth, as smartphones make up only 17% of all mobile subscribers.