Mobile-Processor Market Rebounds MediaTek Challenges Qualcomm in High-End Phones, Wearables

摘要

After a stomach-churning 13% drop in 2015, cellular-processor revenue should rise 5% in 2016, recovering some of the loss. Although the smart-phone market remains weak, cellular tablets and cellular IoT provide some bright spots for growth. LTE is already the dominant protocol as operators begin to shut down their 2G and CDMA networks. Following Intel's withdrawal, the smartphone market is now supplied almost entirely by three merchant processor vendors and three large OEMs that design their own mobile processors. Among the merchant vendors, MediaTek is rapidly gaining share, while Qualcomm is declining. Samsung adopted Qualcomm processors for some of its Galaxy S7 models (after completely shunning the Snapdragon chips for the previous generation), but the largest smartphone maker is moving more of its lower-cost models to in-house Exynos processors and to MediaTek, reducing opportunities for Qualcomm.