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QUALCOMM and Samsung have capitalised on the rise of smartphones and 4G over the past five years to take the top of the market for application-specific mobile handset core integrated circuits.
The IHS iSuppli Wireless Competitive Landscape Tool indicates Qualcomm reigned supreme in 2012, with 31 percent market in the mobile IC market.
Qualcomm has held the top position since 2007, and has even increased its lead by 8 percentage points. Samsung Electronics is number 2 after Qualcomm, with a 21 percent share, representing a rapid rise since 2007.
Together the two companies accounted for more than half of the total market, with the next eight vendors in the Top 10 accounting for another 34 percentage points of share.
The other vendors among the leaders were, in descending order, MediaTek, Intel, Skyworks, Texas Instruments, ST-Ericsson, Renesas, Spreadtrum and Broadcom.
“As smartphones and the next-generation wireless standard known as 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) have gained popularity, the corresponding influences from both forces have created paradigm shifts that transformed competition in the mobile handset core IC market,” said Brad Shaffer, analyst for consumer & communications at IHS.
In 2007, the Apple iPhone arrived, drastically changing the market, allowing a massive rearrangement of company rankings. The companies that benefited from the shift in market orientation rose to domination while others that were caught between changing market environments were left in limbo.
The cellphone core IC space encompasses semiconductors that provide mobile handsets with wireless wide-area-networking (WWAN) communication and application-processing capabilities.
The market segments here include handset core ICs for analog baseband, digital baseband, power amplifiers, radio and intermediate frequencies, high-level operating systems and software processors, and other multimedia or graphics coprocessors.
Other players to look out for include Spreadtrum, which expanded its digital baseband IC revenue by more than 370 percent within the five-year period. Broadcom has also dramatically expanded its revenue, thanks to baseband IC revenue finally gaining traction by ramping design wins since 2011 at Samsung.
On the other hand, Texas Instruments has seen its rank fall from second place in 2007 to sixth in 2012, with market share from 20 percent to 4 percent.
Another vendor near the top in 2007 that experienced a decrease in market share was ST-Ericsson, shrinking 2 percent to a 4 percent market share.
IHS says the structure of the mobile handset core IC market will continue to shift, particularly as LTE becomes more widespread.
Baseband chips, already accounting for more than half the revenue of the total handset core IC space, will maintain their pre-eminence in determining the market-share gains and losses of industry vendors moving forward, IHS believes.
Nonetheless, the future will also be driven by the ability of any given IC supplier to provide platform solutions that optimize the system-level design of all of the ICs, making up the handset’s core chip architecture.