September 9th news, it is certain that the shortage of 4G chip supply will be eased in the fourth quarter of this year. The domestic chip maker's 4G five-mode single-chip solution has been mass-produced, which will definitely further intensify the competition. However, the biggest attraction of the chip industry in the second half of the year is still the catch-and-kill of Qualcomm and MediaTek.
Although MediaTek slowed down on LTE in China, the low-end market was also robbed a lot. However, as Texas Instruments and Broadcom successively withdrew from the mobile phone chip business, the few remaining competitors began to fight close.
Qualcomm and MediaTek's catching and killing
In the past, Qualcomm dominated the high-end market, and MediaTek was in the middle and low end. Now the two are infiltrating each other. Qualcomm "go down" to provide solutions for mass-market smartphones, MediaTek "going up" to force the mid- to high-end market. When asked about the future product layout, the two companies responded similarly to C114's responses:
Qualcomm said: "The company plans to expand 4G LTE into all of Snapdragon's product lines, covering 'full market' demand. For mobile phone manufacturers, using a processor platform to build 4G multi-mode multi-band mobile phones to meet the needs of global operators, It is one of the future development trends. The Snapdragon processor supports LTE across the board, helping terminal manufacturers to launch 4G terminal products for different market levels. The QRD platform is also the industry's first commercial reference design to support multi-mode LTE, providing a variety of chipset combinations. Qualcomm will continue to expand the product roadmap of the QRD program, shifting the performance of the high-end processor to the low-end processor and introducing more platform technologies to help partners quickly differentiate."
MediaTek said: "We adhere to the inclusive brand concept and provide products that everyone can afford. Everyone can enjoy the convenience brought by high technology. In the 4G era, MediaTek has a complete 4G product line in 4G. The market is in a leading position. In less than a year, MediaTek has achieved a full range of 4G product line coverage from entry-level to mid-range to high-end."
However, MediaTek should be alert that “it is easy to go from high to low, and it is difficult to go from low to high.†The Qualcomm Xiaolong 400 series is the industry's first dual-core and quad-core product series that targets the mass market and supports 3G/LTE. . At present, the use of this processor, the mass market-oriented smart phone has been numerous, this is also a series of domestic mobile phone manufacturers reflect that supply is relatively scarce, because the thousand yuan 4G is the most easily detonated point, this market capacity is particularly large, There are also many brands, so the chips in this series are in short supply.
MediaTek grabbed the market with dual chips in the first half of this year, but the overall cost was high. Coupled with the market entering the 64-bit era, MediaTek's low-end market was robbed by Qualcomm. MediaTek's high-end system single-chip solution (SoC) has 32 8-core MT6595 and 64-bit 8-core MT6795. According to MediaTek, MT6595 has entered mass production and is currently shipping smoothly. However, this MediaTek SoC was a late shot, and the lack of LTE support made it impossible for the new machines listed in the first half of the year to support MediaTek products.
In this case, Qualcomm is very confident in eating high-end and low-end markets: "In the future, we will still be committed to shifting the performance of the high-end processors to the low-end processors. Of course, we also believe that the price factor is only Part of the market competition, how to help partners to develop smart phones that meet the needs of operators and mobile phone users at a lower price is our focus. In the future, operators including China Mobile will pay more attention to 5 analog 10 frequency. , 5 analog 13 frequency, even 6-mode multi-frequency, world mode terminal promotion, and consumers are more concerned about performance such as graphics processing, power consumption, multi-mode multi-frequency, these are the advantages of the Opteron processor."
However, no one can say in the future, 2014 is only the commercial first year of LTE, and the future variables are very big. The price war of chips is definitely inevitable. In the first half of the year, the minimum selling price of 4G chips was still more than 12 US dollars. After half a year of confusion, the price drop may exceed 20%.
Price wars are inevitable
The catch-and-kill of Qualcomm and MediaTek has also brought greater competitive pressure to other chip makers. "It must be a fire in the city gate, and a fish in the pool."
"It turns out that everyone has a meal in the ecological chain. Qualcomm's products are at a high place. MTK is at a low place. Everyone has their own range. Now the two fight price wars, then for other competitors, the cost And the pressure on the price will be even greater."
The reality is that even if chip makers can be safe, the competition in the mobile phone market will be transmitted. In the first half of the year, it was no exaggeration to describe the domestic mobile phone manufacturers with "chicken blood". They sang one by one, and they intensively bombarded the domestic mobile phone market. Now there are even 4G smartphones under 600 yuan in the domestic market.
However, domestic mobile phone manufacturers may be very helpless. They are not without high-end consumers in China, but they are willing to pay 3,000, 4,000 or even 5,000 to chase Apple's iPhone, Samsung's new products, but these high-end consumers are domestic. Brands don't catch a cold at all. This will be left to domestic mobile phone manufacturers to use high cost performance to compete for low-end consumers.
Ai and Zhi said that Marvell has a clear understanding of such market conditions and will certainly provide customers with competitive solutions, not only in terms of price, but also user experience, with an emphasis on entry-level and mass-market, Marvell will be active. Participating in the competition, although the past 2G/3G share is not large, but Marvell is ambitious for the LTE market.
Lianxin said that the price war will definitely affect the development of the chip industry. The research and development of 4G products requires a large amount of capital investment, as well as related patent licensing fees, and the manufacturing cost is much higher than that of 3G. "The IC design cost of the 40nm SOC in the 3G era is about one to two hundred million yuan, and the IC design cost of the 28nm LTESOC is about one to two hundred million dollars. Of course, this is not an accurate figure, but also depends on different products. It also has a relationship with the model and specifications."
In general, if the retail price of LTE mobile phones is still maintained at the same price as 3G, then the pressure on chip suppliers is definitely very large.
Shenglinghai said that this seems to be a common problem in domestic hardware manufacturing. For example, wearable devices, or the Internet of Things, according to his observations, the current application market has not been very good feedback, the domestic IoT hardware supply chain is faster than the consumer market, he found that there are already very Many manufacturers are pushing various products, and chip manufacturers have joined in. But in the next two or three years, the price competition will be very fierce, that is to say, this market has not yet started, it has become the Red Sea. There are two main reasons. First, the threshold for entry is relatively low. Second, the entire hardware manufacturing environment in China has already had problems. Everyone did not expect to use the service at first, and compete with the consumer-related ecosystem, but with hardware. The price, use the cost to compete.
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