Qualcomm is reported to have made “non-trivial” cuts to its staff, as it promised to return 75 per cent of its free cash flow to shareholders.

According to GigaOM, the company is “cleaning up its middle management ranks”, with “more cuts ahead as it looks to cut its expenses”. It said that several VP-level executives have lost their jobs with others demoted, and “one division saw nearly 100 jobs cut”.

While Qualcomm has recently published a strong set of quarterly results, there has been concern about its prospects for growth looking forward.

This has been attributed to greater demand for cheaper devices, driven by products targeting emerging markets, as the potential for growth in the high-end reduces.

The company is also seeing increased competition in the mass-market, notably from ambitious Chinese rivals such as MediaTek.

Reuters said that Paul Jacobs, the company’s CEO (pictured), this week promised to return 75 per cent of free cash flow to investors via stock buybacks and increased dividends, although even this was lower than some had been hoping for.

Bloomberg reports that this has been accompanied by a plan to increase dividend payments to shareholders at a faster pace than earnings are increasing.

The news comes as investors have called for the cash-rich company to make firm commitments to longer-term returns plans, in the place of one-offs.

Qualcomm also announced several new products yesterday.

Its Snapdragon processor line has been joined by Snapdragon 805, which it said is “designed to deliver the highest-quality mobile video, imaging and graphics experiences at Ultra HD (4K) resolution, both on device and via Ultra HD TVs”.

It also includes a Krait 450 quadcore CPU, which it said is the first mobile CPU to run at speeds of up to 2.5GHz per core.

Also unveiled was its newest modem chipset, Gobi 9×35, and RF transceiver chipset, WTR3925, which are said to deliver a “single platform that can be used to launch LTE Advanced devices faster at a global scale”.

Gobi 9×35 supports carrier aggregation up to 40MHz for both TD-LTE and FDD LTE category 6 networks, with download speeds of up to 300Mbit/S.

And Qualcomm’s Atheros unit introduced its Qualcomm Internet Processor (which it abbreviates to IPQ), which is designed to “transform networking devices like home gateways, routers and media servers into ‘Smarthome’ platforms.”