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Chinese smartphone maker Oppo abruptly closes chip design unit Zeku

I guess the severe financial pressure is the main reason to shut this chip design unit down.
 
From what I heard Oppo/Zeku SoC was a failure from the start. Competing against QCOM and Apple is much harder than it looks. Hauwei (HiSilicon) is the only China based SoC company that has succeeded and they put billions of dollars into it. Samsung has done okay but not in the same class as QCOM and Apple. I guess there is also UniSoC (former Spreadtrum). Who else? I have not been to China since the pandemic so maybe there are new SoC companies in the works.
 
Daniel Nenni said:
From what I heard Oppo/Zeku SoC was a failure from the start. Competing against QCOM and Apple is much harder than it looks. Hauwei (HiSilicon) is the only China based SoC company that has succeeded and they put billions of dollars into it. Samsung has done okay but not in the same class as QCOM and Apple. I guess there is also UniSoC (former Spreadtrum). Who else? I have not been to China since the pandemic so maybe there are new SoC companies in the works.
Click to expand...

It was not Qcom, but MediaTek who busted the cookie cutter SoC industry. MediaTek is fiercely cost competitive, which makes it zero sense to order your own SoC even with the volume of BBK group, let alone Much smaller Xiaomi.

Remeber, 10 years ago there were all kinds of 65-45nm Chinese SoC doing very very well outside of the cutting edge. Nufron, Allwinner, AmLogic, Rockchips etc, and they were eating into Qcom's lacklustre high-end offer very hard.
 
Paul2 said:
It was not Qcom, but MediaTek who busted the cookie cutter SoC industry. MediaTek is fiercely cost competitive, which makes it zero sense to order your own SoC even with the volume of BBK group, let alone Much smaller Xiaomi.

Remeber, 10 years ago there were all kinds of 65-45nm Chinese SoC doing very very well outside of the cutting edge. Nufron, Allwinner, AmLogic, Rockchips etc, and they were eating into Qcom's lacklustre high-end offer very hard.
Click to expand...

Yes, you are right. MediaTek is an amazing company. They went from trailing edge design to leading edge design. Amazing pivot for a big company.
 
Maturing tech markets tend to favor 3 global competitors with scale in their markets, instead of many “provincial producers”. One of China’s (and the US’s) big challenges with their self-sufficiency push is that that strategy can run counter to building global scale.
 
Paul2 said:
which makes it zero sense to order your own SoC even with the volume of BBK group, let alone Much smaller Xiaomi.
Click to expand...

It makes sense to design your own SOC if you want to differentiate your products from competitors. Any phone maker can use MTK or Qualcomm chip，why should people buy your phone instead of other brands？

Paul2 said:
Remeber, 10 years ago there were all kinds of 65-45nm Chinese SoC doing very very well outside of the cutting edge. Nufron, Allwinner, AmLogic, Rockchips etc, and they were eating into Qcom's lacklustre high-end offer very hard.
Click to expand...

None of the companies you mentioned ever enter mobile phone market
 
2023-05-14_172732.png
 
A unique part of the this sudden closure is that Oppo did not spin off this chip design division (about 2000 to 3000 employees), form some kinds of joint venture with other investors, or scale it down to make it affordable. Oppo just turned the light off and let four years' efforts, money, and R&D go to trash overnight.

Oppo might already try to spin it off or find some outside investors privately but the current environment doesn't allow it to happen.
 
tooLongInEDA said:
What's being measured here (y axis) ? Number of chips (smartphones) ? Or [nominal] total $ value of chips ? Where's the data from ? What happened to the totals ?

Hard to believe that the Apple share doubled in one quarter unless there are some inventory effects affecting some of these players.
Click to expand...
Yes, a doubling from 15% to 31% of the global market in 1 quarter just seems like fantasy.
 
tooLongInEDA said:
What's being measured here (y axis) ? Number of chips (smartphones) ? Or [nominal] total $ value of chips ? Where's the data from ? What happened to the totals ?

Hard to believe that the Apple share doubled in one quarter unless there are some inventory effects affecting some of these players.
Click to expand...
Looks like this is a summary from a purchasable market report. Share looks to be base on nominal value of AP-SoCs. And the notes seem to show Apple‘s rise is due to the fall of others via a softening market and inventory readjustment.

www.counterpointresearch.com

Global Smartphone AP SoC Market Share: Q3 2021 - Q4 2022

MediaTek lost its lead in the global smartphone AP market in Q4 2022 as Apple's chipset shipments increased due to seasonality.
www.counterpointresearch.com www.counterpointresearch.com
 
tonyget said:
None of the companies you mentioned ever enter mobile phone market
Click to expand...

They did, especially in the once popular phablet format.

They had no basebands, but that wasn't an issue in the time when standalone baseband was still ok (3g speeds).
 
tonyget said:
It makes sense to design your own SOC if you want to differentiate your products from competitors. Any phone maker can use MTK or Qualcomm chip，why should people buy your phone instead of other brands？
Click to expand...

There always been very little differentiation after the cortex era started. This is why I call them cookie cutter SoCs.

You basically had a scale 1 to 3 on which you put your performance per cm² for the chip
 
Paul2 said:
Remeber, 10 years ago there were all kinds of 65-45nm Chinese SoC doing very very well outside of the cutting edge. Nufron, Allwinner, AmLogic, Rockchips etc, and they were eating into Qcom's lacklustre high-end offer very hard.
Click to expand...
Are these Chinese SoC doing better or worse after 10 year?
 
VCT said:
Are these Chinese SoC doing better or worse after 10 year?
Click to expand...

Well, worse off obviously as eventually integrated baseband became a big cost saver in the 4g era

They all retreated out of the mobile space, and before they can blink, tapeouts became prohibitively expensive for anything, but smartphones
 
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