In an interview with CNET, the mobile-chip maker's president, Derek Aberle, discusses his company's strategy to grow in 2015, as well as its China troubles.

Qualcomm's booth at CES 2015, filled with robots, wearables, VR goggles, a car and plenty more. Sarah Tew/CNET

LAS VEGAS -- The brightly colored Qualcomm booth at this year's Consumer Electronics Show packed in a panoply of gadgets: There was a red-dragon robot, a blue connected car with Qualcomm's logo splashed across the hood and disembodied mannequin hands in glass cases wearing a range of smartwatches.

As thousands of people walked through the loud and sprawling Las Vegas Convention Center -- with Qualcomm's space right in the middle of the chaos -- Derek Aberle, the company's president, sat in a quiet meeting room tucked in the back of the expansive booth to discuss his company's strategies for 2015.

As the booth illustrated, Qualcomm -- already the world's biggest maker of mobile chips -- is hoping to use its wealth of research in mobile devices to become the company powering wearables, robots, cars, medical technologies and more.

Aberle at Qualcomm's CES 2015 press conference, where he discussed the company's plans to expand into a lot more areas this year. Josh Miller/CNET

"We look at it and say, OK, with a relatively small incremental investment and the right go-to-market," Aberle said of Qualcomm's push into new tech sectors, "we can capture a pretty big opportunity, just leveraging this massive investment we made because of the scale of the smartphone business."

Qualcomm's expansion effort comes as tech firms scramble to connect millions of objects to the Web -- an idea known as the Internet of Things -- creating vast new ground for chipmakers like Qualcomm to gain new business. While the Internet of Things area offers huge potential, its already invited plenty of competition from Qualcomm's rivals. For example, fellow chipmaker Intel -- whose booth was stationed right next to Qualcomm's on the convention floor -- constructed a booth just as broad and filled with all kinds of connected devices.

It's clear why these companies are so keen to stake a claim in this area: the market for Internet of Things is expected to grow to $3.04 trillion by 2020, according to market research firm IDC.

While Qualcomm tries to capture a piece of all these new markets, the maker of Snapdragon mobile chips has been distracted by an ongoing investigation by Chinese regulators. Officials there have spent more than a year looking into whether the chipmaker's lucrative licensing business runs afoul of the country's anti-monopoly laws. Aberle couldn't say when the investigation might be resolved, but he said it was unlikely any negative outcome out of China would -- as some analysts predict -- create a domino effect, with fines or new limitations spreading to more countries.

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