OPPO, vivo, and Xiaomi placed large additional orders, and Qualcomm became TSMC's third largest customer

According to Taiwan's "Business Times", due to the large-scale orders from mainland mobile phone manufacturers such as OPPO, vivo, and Xiaomi, IC design leader MediaTek's 5G mobile phone chip orders have increased significantly, and it is expected that shipments in the first half of 2021 will reach 80 to 90 million sets, which is about 1.6 to 1.8 times the full-year shipments in 2020.

Image source: Commercial Times

MediaTek expanded its 7nm wafer production at TSMC in the first quarter, and its 6nm flagship 5G chip Dimensity 1200 also began mass production. In the first quarter, MediaTek invested 110,000 pieces of 7 and 6nm wafers at TSMC, surpassing Qualcomm to become TSMC's third largest customer.

Apple will fully switch to the 5nm process in 2021. The A14 application processor and the first Arm architecture processor M1, which will be installed in the iPhone 12, will continue to use TSMC's 5nm process for mass production. Apple will subsequently launch Apple Silicon and graphics processors (GPUs) for desktop computers, and the A15 application processor for the iPhone 13 in the second half of the year, which will be mass-produced using TSMC's 5nm wafers in the second and third quarters. As for Apple's vacant 7nm production capacity, it has been filled by AMD and MediaTek.

Mobile phone industry insiders pointed out that mobile phone manufacturers including OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi and others are making all-out efforts to increase shipments in order to grab market share from Huawei, and have expanded their purchases of 5G mobile phone chips from MediaTek. As for Huawei's independent new Honor, it will also use MediaTek's 5G mobile phone chips. It is estimated that MediaTek's 5G mobile phone chip shipments in the first half of the year will reach 80 to 90 million sets, which is about 1.6 to 1.8 times the full-year shipments in 2020.

In 2020, MediaTek released the Dimensity 1000 series, Dimensity 800/820 series, 700/720 series, and 400 series 5G chips, covering high, medium and low-end, becoming the second largest 5G chip supplier after Qualcomm. These chips are all manufactured using TSMC's 7nm process, and the Dimensity 1200 series flagship chip, which will be released soon, will be manufactured using TSMC's 6nm process.