Qualcomm didn't expect it! After Huawei fell, it was accidentally caught in the crossfire

Qualcomm didn’t expect it! After Huawei fell, it was accidentally caught in the crossfire!

The smartphone market is currently very competitive. Apple, Samsung and Huawei occupy most of the high-end market, while domestic companies such as OPPO, Xiaomi, vivo, etc. have been fighting in the mid-to-high-end market.

Since Huawei temporarily withdrew from the high-end market, although domestic mobile phone manufacturers have continuously increased hardware configuration and improved actual performance, Apple eventually took over most of Huawei's market.

The main reason is the single supply of mobile phone processors. Some mobile phone manufacturers have their own developed chips, but the core processors that determine the performance of mobile phones mostly come from IC chip design companies such as Qualcomm and MediaTek.

On the one hand, mobile phone manufacturers without high-end processors must purchase core processors from Qualcomm, MediaTek and others. On the other hand, they also need to pay patent royalties to Qualcomm when using Qualcomm technology. In particular, Qualcomm's 5G baseband chip is the first choice for mobile phone manufacturers that currently support 5G functions.

When Huawei was around, domestic mobile phone manufacturers had other options. After all, Huawei's processors and chips can be self-sufficient. Since Huawei's 5G chips were banned, Qualcomm and MediaTek have become the biggest winners.

However, in the past year, MediaTek has been full of momentum, especially after the release of Dimensity 9000, which has been adopted by many domestic mobile phones. Qualcomm failed due to the power consumption of 8Gen 1, and MediaTek became the biggest winner.

MediaTek surpasses Qualcomm

MediaTek recently announced its first quarter results for 2022, which were very impressive. The report showed that MediaTek's total revenue in the first quarter was 31.7 billion yuan, an increase of 11% year-on-year, and its gross profit increased by 50.3% year-on-year, with a net profit of 8.1 billion yuan. The report analyzed that the main driving force for performance growth was the product portfolio.

When Qualcomm launched Snapdragon 8Gen 1, MediaTek also launched Dimensity 9000. OPPO also launched both versions at the same time. The difference is that Dimensity 9000 uses TSMC's 4nm process and ARM V9 architecture, while Snapdragon 8 uses Samsung's 4nm process and ARM V9 architecture. In terms of parameter comparison, the performance of the two is very close.

Then, everyone knows the story behind it, that is, Dimensity succeeded and Snapdragon failed. As a direct result, in the Chinese market in 2021, MediaTek shipped more than 100 million more chips than Qualcomm. Although Qualcomm's overall revenue is more than 2 times that of MediaTek, MediaTek's growth rate is much higher than Qualcomm.