Mediatek is one of the companies I frequently visit when I am in Hsinchu. They are a very close partner with TSMC and has shown an incredible amount of resilience. Here is an article that summarizes MediaTek quite well in my opinion:
Hey Alexa, Which Chipmaker Found Life After Smartphones?: Gadfly
"A curious thing has happened over the past year, however. Global smartphone demand hasn’t turned around, and competition to supply chips for the devices has barely eased. Yet MediaTek’s shares are up 65 percent over the past 12 months."
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And this is not the first pivot MediaTek has made. MTK was originally part of pure-play foundry UMC making chips for the consumer electronics market but was spun out in 1997 and taken public on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in 2001. MKT started out making chips for DVD players, TV, and early mobile phones. They expanded into smartphones and tablets and today are the number two SoC company, QCOM being number one. QCOM dominates the high end SoCs/smartphones while MKT is known for mid to low end products.
Up to 2009, MTK's success was in 2G until they launched a wide range of chips for 3G moving up to 40nm chips in 2012 (QCOM was already at 28nm). Mediatek is covered in our book Mobile Unleashed in chapter 10 “An Industry in Transition”. We could have done a complete chapter on them like we did with Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm and we probably should have because it truly is an interesting story, absolutely.
Hey Alexa, Which Chipmaker Found Life After Smartphones?: Gadfly
"A curious thing has happened over the past year, however. Global smartphone demand hasn’t turned around, and competition to supply chips for the devices has barely eased. Yet MediaTek’s shares are up 65 percent over the past 12 months."
View attachment 21547
And this is not the first pivot MediaTek has made. MTK was originally part of pure-play foundry UMC making chips for the consumer electronics market but was spun out in 1997 and taken public on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in 2001. MKT started out making chips for DVD players, TV, and early mobile phones. They expanded into smartphones and tablets and today are the number two SoC company, QCOM being number one. QCOM dominates the high end SoCs/smartphones while MKT is known for mid to low end products.
Up to 2009, MTK's success was in 2G until they launched a wide range of chips for 3G moving up to 40nm chips in 2012 (QCOM was already at 28nm). Mediatek is covered in our book Mobile Unleashed in chapter 10 “An Industry in Transition”. We could have done a complete chapter on them like we did with Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm and we probably should have because it truly is an interesting story, absolutely.
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