Broadcom Seeks to Win Sales at Nokia

Broadcom Corp. Chief Executive Scott McGregor says he is focused on winning Nokia Corp. as a customer for the company’s mobile-phone chips for the first time.

McGregor, who joined Broadcom in January, said his experience selling semiconductors to Nokia while he ran Royal Philips Electronics’ chip business might give him the inside track. In his effort to take on Qualcomm Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc., the world’s biggest makers of chips for handsets, McGregor said he would draw on that experience.

“At Philips, I was a billioneuro-per-year supplier to Nokia,” McGregor said in an interview last week at Broadcom’s headquarters in Irvine. “The cellphone market is a huge growth opportunity for us.”

Broadcom, known for building the chips that run television set-top boxes, is pursuing new markets as growth slows. After topping 49% in both 2003 and 2004, the company’s revenue growth is expected to slow to 5% this year because Intel Corp. stopped buying Broadcom’s chipsets for servers.

Broadcom has won smaller customers such as Palm Inc., which uses its chips in the Treo 650, a combined mobile phone and electronic organizer.

The company also has received orders from China’s Konka Group and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, the world’s sixth-biggest handset maker.