The chip business is rocking thanks to China, Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf told CNBC on Thursday.
"We have very strong demand in the chip business and if you look at our quarter that we delivered, it was actually a very strong quarter from the EPS perspective," Mollenkopf said on "Closing Bell." "It was actually [a] record even from the licensing perspective and we had a strong outlook from the chip side of the business, which is really more a leading indicator of what will happen on the licensing side."
In his first television interview as CEO, Mollenkopf characterized the strength in China as "broad" and spread across multiple tiers and original equipment manufacturers. And he thinks demand from China will only continue to grow.
"What we think is going to happen in China is as China adopts LTE, and that becomes a very, very large market for LTE it will also be an area where strength in the Chinese market will enable those same OEMs to export," Mollenkopf said.
—By CNBC's Drew Sandholm.