According to market analysis agency Strategy Analytics, in the first quarter of this year, the share of China's chip companies' Spreadtrum increased by 45%, MediaTek's growth rate was 12%, the former was 3.75%, and another Chinese chip company Hass increased its share by 29%. Also higher than MediaTek.
SA pointed out that MediaTek, Spreadtrum, and Huawei Hass held 25.2%, 13.5%, and 2.2% of the market share of mobile processors in the first quarter, and the top one was Qualcomm with more than 40% of the shares, but apparently MediaTek and Qualcomm The share gap is narrowing. MediaTek's share last year was 22.5%, Spreadtrum 9.3%, and Hass 1.7%.
Before last year, Spreadtrum continued to snatch up the markets of MediaTek and Qualcomm in the global 3G market by means of price competition. In the first quarter of last year, it successfully surpassed MediaTek to rank second in the 3G market share, and there was not much difference with Qualcomm.
Spreadtrum has become a supplier to Samsung and provided chips for Samsung’s Tizen system phone last year. The shipment reached 3 million, helping Samsung to increase its share in the Indian market; earlier, Spreadtrum had taken the share of India’s largest domestic brand micromax and became Chip supplier.
After repeated efforts to obtain today's gratifying results, under the pressure of Spreadtrum's competition, MediaTek has also had to cut prices to meet the challenges of the exhibition. In the second quarter of this year, MediaTek hit a record high for its quarterly revenue, but at the same time its gross profit has also reached historical lows. This shows that Spreadtrum’s bargaining competition has affected it.
In terms of R&D, the company hunted MediaTek and Morningstar talented people in Taiwan (these two companies reduced a lot of employees after the merger), and further excavated Yuandi Wen, the former head of the mobile phone chip division of MediaTek, and set up an R&D department in Taiwan to facilitate employees in Taiwan. Spreadtrum work.
At present, Spreadtrum has launched the SC9860 chip with 16nm process. This chip is the same as MediaTek's current hot helio P10 architecture, but the process is more advanced. MediaTek is about to launch P10's successor, P20, with the same architecture and manufacturing process as the SC9860, but it cannot support it. LTE Cat7 technology and SC9860 support, which became the weakness of MediaTek.
So far, all chips of MediaTek have failed to support LTE Cat7 technology. In the case that China Mobile requires mobile phone companies to support LTE Cat7 technology, domestic mobile phones have abandoned MediaTek chips, in particular, OPPO and vivo, which have made MediaTek achieve high growth, have abandoned it. The chip and switch to Qualcomm's chip caused a heavy blow to it.
Spreadtrum's competitive advantages in pricing, technology, and localization will result in better results in the second half of the year than in the first quarter, further reducing the gap with MediaTek, and in particular accelerating the pace of its technology research and development through the addition of a large number of Taiwanese technical talents. However, MediaTek's lag in baseband technology development has become a drag on its development.
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