A Wired Report on MediaTek

choi

Mat Honan, The Next Global Smartphone Revolution: Made in Taiwan. Wired, Feb 5, 2013.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/02/mediatek/

Quote:

(a) "Within four years, MediaTek estimates, the market for unsubsidized smartphones that cost $200 or less will be in the neighborhood of 730 million units.

"And the subsidization issue is key. In China, and much of the rest of the world, phones are sold in retail shops you find in strip malls and markets, not the Chinese equivalent of an AT&T store run by a telco. These phones aren’t subsidized by carriers, so price is a prime concern. The phone and SIM often are purchased separately.

"Go to a mall anywhere in China or the developing world and you’ll see a staggering array of form factors from manufacturers you’ve never heard of. To some extent, this is a reflection of necessity. Networks and needs vary from place to place — for example, customers may want a phone with multiple SIM cards for different carriers — so phones are built to suit local needs. MediaTek pioneered this approach in China, where it fueled the market in off-brand mobile phones. As it expanded internationally, that model turned out to be well-suited for a global scale.

“'A lot of this stuff is consumer use case developed because of the retail aspects of those countries,' explains Moynihan.

"One of MediaTek’s biggest selling points has been flexibility. Operating at enormous scale, MediaTek can pack lots of features into its phones at lower cost than manufacturers operating on a market-by-market basis. It can deliver cheap phones with rich multimedia experiences, while letting local brands to do the hard work of establishing identity and consumer recognition.

"For example, because it isn’t beholden to carriers, its phones have long supported multi-SIM and dual band. This is essential in markets where consumers might use different SIMs to call different people, or different countries, or at different times. In some markets, like Brazil, MediaTek phones might have as many as four SIM slots.

(b) "MediaTek shipped 550 million feature phone chipsets in 2011 and 10 million smartphone chipsets. It shipped another 400 million feature phones last year, but while that [sale of feature phone chipsets] declines, it sold a full 110 million smartphone chipsets. * * *  It’s [MediaTek's] already the biggest smartphone chip supplier in China, where its chipsets power some 30 to 50 percent of the smartphone handsets sold last year, according to analyst estimates. And while that may be bad news for Samsung, it’s very good news for Google’s Android operating system

My comment:
(a) feature phone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_phone
(b) Ching-Jiang HSIEH, president of MediaTek
聯發科 總經理 謝 清江
(c) There is no need to read the rest of the report.