Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf believes there is still plenty of room for growth in the smartphone space. Smartphone sales have been booming for years and many industry watchers believe the industry is overheating, but Mollenkopf is confident that consumers will still be upgrading their mobiles like there's no tomorrow.

Qualcomm has a very good reason to be bullish. Its smartphone chip sales grew 39 percent last year and the company shipped more than a billion chips, including SoCs and modems. However, by 2017 IDC analysts expect smartphone growth to slow to about 8 percent, as smartphones mature.

Still, Mollenkopf insists that the smartphone market is still wet behind its ears and that emerging markets will be the main growth drivers moving forward.

“Cell phone technology has barely made it into the car, it’s barely made it into health care, it’s barely made it into a lot of areas where it will go,” he pointed out in a recent conference call, reports Bloomberg. 

Mollenkopf believes the gap between what people want to do with mobile tech and what the industry is currently doing is still pretty large. Integration and diversification seems to be the next avenue - getting cellular tech into cars, medical devices and integrating stuff with wearables.