Qualcomm vs. MediaTek: The Inflection Point Appears in the Smartphone Market

Cai Mingjie, the founder of mobile phone chip maker MediaTek (MTK), may not have imagined that rival Qualcomm’s counterattack has come so fast. The smart phone chips that have just been listed have only made MediaTek about two months.

"The bloody price war will be triggered and it is still just the beginning of the price war." Gao Guiming, senior vice president of Guohong Communications, disclosed to the "First Financial Daily" that Qualcomm's new dual-core smart chip solution has a price reduction of up to 7 The US dollar pulled down the overall price of the high-end low-end smart phone motherboard solution from more than 50 US dollars to more than 40 US dollars, and this price range is the main battlefield of MediaTek's thousands of smart phone solutions.

He said that in the field of smart machines, MediaTek is just a follower, and Qualcomm is leading MediaTek on 3G smart chip technology, which will surely follow up the price war if it wants to increase its share.

Because, the size of the Chinese smart phone market is rapidly expanding. According to Strategy Anabnlytics, China’s smart phone shipments reached 24 million units in the third quarter of this year, an increase of 58% from the previous period, surpassing that of the United States and becoming the world’s largest smartphone market, and it is expected that the capacity of the Chinese smartphone market will reach 153 million next year. .

$100 matchup

"Next year, Qualcomm will use the 'public board' approach to help China's authorized small and medium-sized customers push Android smartphones under $100." At the end of November, Qian Zhijun, product director of Qualcomm, said at the Smart Phone Summit in Shenzhen that Qualcomm The newly established China R&D center in Shanghai will help small and medium customers to lower technical barriers and shorten development time. “If you do not change the original design, you can launch new products within two or three months.”

What Qian Zhijun called the “public board” is in fact the QRD platform for the turnkey solution for smartphones recently released by Qualcomm. Qualcomm also announced that relying on the QRD platform, mobile phone manufacturers to launch new products from the previous six months, the shortest reduction to 30 to 60 days.

The launch of Qualcomm's QRD platform was also seen by the mobile phone industry as the biggest blockade for Qualcomm in the 3G smartphone field. Because, in the past, Qualcomm had only sold mobile phone chips, MediaTek quickly occupied the 2G mobile phone market through the “public board” solution. Now that Qualcomm is willing to lower its price to replicate this model, where does MediaTek go?

“There is no news of price cuts.” An insider of MediaTek China told the newspaper yesterday that the MT6573, the main chip of MediaTek’s smart phone, was only listed in August this year, and the MT6575 clocked at 1GHZ will be listed on the market early next year. From the point of view of MT6573, which has been listed on a large scale, not only has China's mobile phone manufacturers succeeded in breaking through the thousand-thousand-digit mark of smart phones, but also the overall performance of smart phones has been quite superior.

"At present, only Qualcomm is testing the water-thousand-dollar smart phone market. It is still difficult to estimate how the market will develop in the future," said the insider. In an interview with the media in November, MediaTek’s general manager Xie Qingjiang also stated that the ability to customize products and product prices has always been an advantage of MediaTek, and will not change in the field of smart phones. Even compared to Qualcomm, MediaTek is slightly better in terms of service detail.

Xie Qingjiang revealed that most of R&D's R&D resources have gradually been transferred to smart phones, and MediaTek already has orders from more than 20 mainland smartphone manufacturers including Lenovo. It is expected that MediaTek's smart phone chip shipments in 2012 will be 2011. 2 times, reaching 20 million sets.

In fact, it was precisely because of the scale of sales of smart phone chips that the performance of MediaTek's continued decline was reversed for the first time in October. In October, MediaTek’s revenue was NT$7.532 billion, an increase of 2.13% year-on-year; November revenue was NT$7.63 billion, an increase of 3.65% year-on-year.

"In the short term, whether it is Qualcomm or MediaTek is still in the stage of the expansion of the smartphone market of 1,000 yuan, there will not be a fierce price war." Liu Wenquan, general manager of New Creative Mobile, pointed out that the current three telecom operators in China are subsidized Policies are gradually opening up, especially China Unicom (microblogging), and even local Unicom companies can customize tariff packages to cooperate with mobile phone manufacturers to expand their 3G subscribers, allowing China's smart phone market to suddenly turn a corner at the 1,000-yuan mark. The demand is too large, including Mediatruck's MT6573 is still out of stock."

Thousand yuan intelligent machine

It is based on the emergence of the inflection point of the Chinese smart phone market, the domestic mainstream mobile phone manufacturers have recently released their own series of smart phones in order to meet the growth of blowout next year.

On December 20, TCL Communication released 12 smart terminals at home in one fell swoop and announced its return to the mainstream mobile phone market in China. One month ago, Jinli Communications also launched 7 smart phones and announced that it will ship 15 million smart phones in 2012. Huang Wanquan, senior vice president of TCL Communications, said that in 2012 TCL Communications will launch 50 new smart phone products. On average, 3 to 5 new products will be released every month.

The newspaper learned from insiders of TCL Communication and Jinli Communication that the new smart phones launched were mainly based on WCDMA mobile phones, and MediaTek and Qualcomm were basically equally divided in the selection of mobile phone chip solutions. The difference is that Qualcomm plans to focus on mid- to high-end products, while MediaTek’s program focuses on mid- to high-end products.

“Compared with MediaTek, there are still some thresholds for choosing Qualcomm.” Liu Wenquan pointed out that for domestic small and medium mobile phone manufacturers, smart phone R&D still has a certain technical threshold. Even if a smartphone prototype is made, there will be many problems in performance stability. . The advantage of MediaTek is that it has strong service capabilities and can help mobile phone manufacturers solve practical problems at any time.

Gao Guiming also said that although Qualcomm hopes to cut prices to obtain more customer support, but from the current market price point of view, Qualcomm and MediaTek's thousand-yuan smartphone program spreads still reach 10 US dollars. In the past, domestic mobile phone manufacturers were closely associated with MediaTek and the communication was very smooth. If we consider the launch speed of new products and the cost of the whole machine, domestic mobile phone manufacturers are still more inclined to MediaTek. “Compared with MediaTek, Qualcomm’s openness and service capabilities Deficiency."

Jeff Lorbeck, senior vice president of Qualcomm, also stated that the QRD model is only open to existing Qualcomm customers, that is, Qualcomm chips and technology licensing manufacturers. From this point of view, Qualcomm's real purpose in blocking MediaTek is still being a major domestic customer, not the market for the Shantui mobile phone that MediaTek had forged.

"A large part of the thousand yuan smart phone is the dual-card dual-standby market." A high-level mobile phone third-party design company pointed out that although Qualcomm also launched a dual-card dual standby smart phone program, but MediaTek on the dual-card dual standby The accumulation of technology and experience is not comparable to Qualcomm. Therefore, the real purpose of Qualcomm's launch of the QRD platform is to expand from the high-end to the mid-end, and MediaTek’s strategy should be to move from the mid-end to the low-end to distinguish each other from the edge of the market.

According to Gu Wenjun, an analyst at iSuppli, the market for mobile phone chips cannot be dominated by a single person, because the complexity of smart phone development determines that whether it is Qualcomm or MediaTek, its main energy is to serve its major customers. And mobile phone manufacturers will not only be bound to a mobile phone chip manufacturer. For product differentiation, they will also choose the second or third mobile phone chip supplier.