MediaTek in trouble

MediaTek expects a poor first quarter

MediaTek thinks that its smartphone chip shipments will fall below 100 million units in the first quarter of 2017 and rebound only slightly to 110-120 million in the second quarter.

According to Digitimes, MediaTek shipped 480 million units of smartphone solutions in 2016 and the outfit might struggle to post smartphone chip shipment growth in 2017 due to disappointing results during the first half of the year.

The outfit has lost some of its major major customers including Meizu, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo which have shifted a portion of their smartphone AP orders to Qualcomm. True, the company has also got some new orders placed by Samsung Electronics, but the loss of orders from China is hurting.

MediaTek has been defending its share of the smartphone application processor (AP) market since the latter half of 2016, and the efforts will become more difficult in 2017.

Digitimes Research thinks that Qualcomm will manage to grow its share of China’s smartphone AP market above 30 percent in the first quarter of 2017, while MediaTek’s market share will drop below 40 percent.