Who Is Cristiano Amon? Qualcomm CEO Since June 2021

Cristiano Amon is the president and chief executive of Qualcomm, the chip company he joined as an engineer in 1995 and has led since June 2021. He ran its chip business and then served as company president before the top job. Qualcomm's annual report, filed in early November 2026, lists him as CEO.

Phone chips made up 64.7% of revenue in Qualcomm's chip business in fiscal 2026, the lowest share in the six fiscal years since Amon took over in 2021. Car chips picked up the share phones lost. Their revenue reached about $6 billion, roughly 5.4 times the fiscal 2021 figure. Amon says data centers come next.

How Did Cristiano Amon Become Qualcomm's CEO?

Amon joined Qualcomm in 1995 as an engineer. The company's 2026 proxy statement says he held several technical and leadership roles along the way, and it lists a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. From October 2007 he was senior vice president of product management at QCT, Qualcomm's chip business. That job gave him the product roadmap, including Snapdragon, the platform Qualcomm sells to phone makers.

QCT sells Qualcomm's chips, and a separate arm called QTL licenses its patents. From June 2012 Amon was co-president of QCT. In November 2015 he became its president while serving as an executive vice president of Qualcomm Technologies, the subsidiary that runs most of its engineering. He became president of the whole company in January 2018.

Qualcomm's leadership page credits Amon in that job with leading its 5G strategy and with driving "the expansion and diversification of the business" into fields such as cars and computing.

The handover came three years later. In January 2021 chief executive Steve Mollenkopf told the board's chair he planned to retire after 26 years at Qualcomm, seven of them as CEO, and the board named Amon CEO-elect the same day. Mollenkopf retired as CEO at the end of June 2021, when Amon took over as chief executive and joined the board.

That's 26 years from his first Qualcomm job to chief executive. Qualcomm's leadership page also lists undated jobs outside the company, including chief technical officer of the wireless operator Vésper and leadership roles at NEC and Ericsson.

Cristiano Amon's Career and Record in Brief

Is Cristiano Amon Leaving Qualcomm?

Qualcomm's annual report and its 8-K filings to early November 2026 show no sign of a departure. Amon signed the annual report as president and chief executive on the day the company reported its fiscal 2026 results.

If a chief executive resigns, retires or is let go, a US company like Qualcomm must disclose it in a Form 8-K within four business days.

Qualcomm filed 13 of those short event reports from September 2025 to early November 2026. Ten covered results, the shareholder vote and other company business. Three reported board changes. One added a director in September 2025, while the other two said two directors would leave the board at the March 2026 annual meeting. None of the three concerned Amon.

Any decision on his job sits with a board chaired by Mark McLaughlin, an independent director. The proxy says every director except Amon is independent and that Qualcomm has kept the chair and chief executive roles apart since March 2014.

More than five years into the job, Amon is still early in his tenure next to Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, who took charge of his chip company in 2006.

None of that promises he'll stay. Any departure by Amon would show up in an 8-K, so that's the filing you'd watch.

Is Cristiano Amon a Good CEO?

Shareholders backed him heavily. His re-election to the board at the March 2026 annual meeting drew about 747 million votes for and 3.2 million withheld, so about 99.6% of those votes went his way.

The harder test for any Qualcomm chief is the phone business. The annual report says Apple and Samsung each brought in at least a tenth of Qualcomm's fiscal 2026 revenue. It expects Apple to use mostly its own modems from here on, which Qualcomm says will hurt its chip revenue significantly.

Samsung, one of the two chip stocks behind the EWY Korea ETF, has used its own chips in some of its devices too.

So the number to watch is the mix. Phone chips held between about 74% and 77% of QCT revenue from fiscal 2021 through 2024, then slipped to 72% in 2025 and 65% in 2026. Qualcomm restated fiscal 2021 and 2022 on its current three-stream basis in its 2023 annual report.

Phones themselves did part of it. Handset revenue fell about 13% in fiscal 2026 while car-chip revenue rose about 52%. Over the six fiscal years, chip revenue outside phones doubled from about $6.5 billion to $13.1 billion, while the chip business as a whole grew about 38%.

If you're judging Amon, keep both in view. The mix moved the way he has pointed the company. The phone business, which still earns most of the money, went backwards in fiscal 2026.

What Did Qualcomm Report for Fiscal 2026?

Qualcomm's results release put fiscal 2026 revenue at $43.1 billion, down 3% from the year before. Revenue for the fourth quarter fell 8% to $10.3 billion.

Car chips were the bright spot, with fourth-quarter automotive revenue up 89% at nearly $2 billion, which Qualcomm called a record. The release also said Qualcomm renewed long-term licensing agreements with Apple, Huawei and Transsion.

If you look only at net income, which more than doubled, fiscal 2026 seems far stronger than its revenue suggests. Tax accounting explains much of that gap. Net income included a $5.7 billion tax benefit from releasing a reserve against tax assets that Qualcomm had set up in fiscal 2025.

Amon pointed to what comes next. "Fiscal 2027 marks the start of our non-handset revenue inflection, including the ramp of our Data Center business," he said in the release. Qualcomm projects its revenue outside phones to grow more than 60% in fiscal 2027. It also kept its own target of $5 billion in Data Center revenue for that year.

If you're tracking the next quarter, the company's own guidance for the first quarter of fiscal 2027 is revenue of $10.4 billion to $11.2 billion. From that quarter, Data Center counts inside the chip business.

That push takes Qualcomm into a market where Broadcom already sells custom chips to the big cloud companies. Hock Tan pointed to Broadcom's AI networking strength ahead of its second-quarter results in June 2026.

Can You Trade Qualcomm on Phemex?

Not the shares. Phemex lists QCOMUSDT, a perpetual futures contract on Qualcomm's stock with no expiry date, settled in USDT and offering up to 10x leverage. It has traded since May 2026, and each contract is worth one QCOM.

Like Phemex's other TradFi futures, it lets you go long or short on the price without owning the stock. You get no dividends and no shareholder vote, and positions pay or receive a funding fee every eight hours. The contract also trades at weekends, when Nasdaq is closed, so its price can move away from Qualcomm's last close before the next session opens.

Futures use leverage, and a leveraged position is closed automatically if losses push its margin below a set minimum.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the CEO of Qualcomm?

Cristiano Amon has been Qualcomm's president and chief executive since June 2021. He was company president from January 2018, and before that he ran its chip business.

What else does Cristiano Amon do?

Qualcomm's 2026 proxy statement says Amon has been a director of Adobe, the software company, since October 2023. He also holds a seat on Qualcomm's own board, which shareholders renewed in March 2026.

What does QCT stand for at Qualcomm?

QCT stands for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, the chip business behind Snapdragon. Amon co-led it from June 2012 and led it from November 2015 until he became company president in January 2018.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.