As we all know, there are signs of weakness in the chip market in 2022, and many US chip giants cannot bear it. Companies such as Qualcomm , Intel , NVIDIA, AMD, etc. have experienced varying degrees of decline in net profits, with the highest drop reaching 90%.
Among them, Qualcomm's situation is not optimistic. Since the upstream smartphone market cannot sell, Qualcomm has also been cut off by mobile phone manufacturers. " destocking " has become the main task of major mobile phone manufacturers.
Recently, Strategy Analytics released a new report. From the data, more than 40% of Qualcomm’s revenue comes from , apple and Samsung . In fiscal year 20214, Apple contributed US$7.7 billion in revenue to Qualcomm, while in fiscal year 2022, Apple's revenue contribution to Qualcomm increased to US$9.2 billion.
Although Apple is Qualcomm’s big customer, there are conflicts between Apple and Qualcomm. As we all know, Qualcomm is known as a "patent troll" and is ruthless in collecting patent fees. Apple is also one of the "victims". In addition, starting from the iPhone 12 series, Apple has used Qualcomm's plug-in baseband chip , but it has suffered from serious "weak signal" problems. Therefore, Apple has been working hard on self-developed baseband, and also spent US$1 billion to acquire Intel's chip team.
Not long ago, Apple’s self-developed baseband failed, which also eased the relationship between Qualcomm and Apple. According to Strategy Analytics, in 2023, Qualcomm will own 100% of the market share of Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S . In this dual monopoly, foreign media also said that Qualcomm can continue to make money.
In fact, Qualcomm has also determined that Qualcomm has shifted from 75% share of Samsung Galaxy S22 series to global share, and Qualcomm plans to provide about 20% of 5G baseband chips for the iPhone 15 series in 2023. Obviously, in the field of chips and , Qualcomm's position is still very stable. Even world giants such as Apple and Samsung cannot bypass Qualcomm.
Returning to the domestic mobile phone market, domestic mobile phone manufacturers are not low in dependence on Qualcomm. Many domestic mobile phone brands are competing for the right to launch Qualcomm Snapdragon chips. It is undeniable that the market share of MediaTek has surpassed Qualcomm, but in the field of advanced chips, Qualcomm's advantages are still obvious, and this is where MediaTek still needs to work hard.
It is worth mentioning that there are also problems in the research and development of the A-series chips for iPhones. Foreign media broke the news that many engineers from Apple's A-series chip R&D team have left. The brain drain has caused certain obstacles to Apple's self-developed chips. This is also the main reason why the A16 chip performed less than expected. Therefore, industry insiders also said that Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips are likely to surpass Apple's A-series chips. If this is really the case, then Qualcomm's good days of making money are still to come.
But having said that, domestic technology companies cannot give up self-research. It is precisely because of the high technical barriers of US companies that we are at risk of being "stuck". If Kirin chip is still there, domestic mobile phone manufacturers will not be so passive. Therefore, it is important to persist in self-research. It is very difficult, but we cannot give up! What do you think about this? Welcome to leave comments and messages!
