Seoul, Hong Kong, New Delhi, Beijing, London, Buenos Aires, San Diego
December 29th, 2017
Qualcomm leads, Apple grabs 20% of the value share and Samsung was the fastest growing vendor
According to Counterpoint Research’s Component Tracker Q3 2017, the global smartphone System-on-Chip (SoC) market grew 19% annually in Q3 2017 crossing $8 billion in chipset revenues.
Commenting on the performance of the SOC players, Research Analyst, Shobhit Srivastava, “Qualcomm led the smartphone SoC market strengthening its position further capturing 42% of the total SoC revenues in Q3 2017. The San Diego based technology company saw rising adoption for its mid to high range SoCs by the fast-growing Chinese brands, boosting its SOC shipments 15% compared to last year. Apple took the second spot capturing 20% value share banking on steady performance for its iPhone portfolio followed by MediaTek, Samsung and HiSilicon (Huawei)
Mr Srivastava, further added, “The vertically integrated players like Samsung, Apple and Huawei have been increasingly employing their own SOCs within their portfolio over the last few years. As a result, the combined share of the SoCs of these big three have rose from 20% level in 2015 to around 30% level in terms of volumes. This has somewhat hurt hare of some of the horizontal players such as MediaTek mainly and likes of Marvell, Broadcom and others which were forced to exit this space.”
Exhibit 1: Smartphone SoC Market Share by Value Q3 2017
Commenting on the new trends in the smartphone SoC segment, Counterpoint Research Director Mr. Neil Shah said, “The focus in the smartphone SoC market has shifted away from the number of processor cores to the integration of newer technologies driving newer experiences. For example: focusing on immersion to unlock new experiences such as AR/VR/Depth Sensing leveraging integrated ISP (Image Signal Processors) and GPUs, to other areas such as Artificial Intelligence engines, dedicated security architecture at chipset level, enhanced connectivity paving the path to 5G and higher performance at lower power consumption levels.”
Further expanding on this trend, Mr. Shah said, “Apple and HiSilicon (Huawei) both launched SoCs with dedicated Neural Processing Units (NPUs) for AI processing at the edge. On the other hand, Qualcomm has kept the AI architecture dynamic & flexible leveraging three subsystems from Adreno GPU to Hexagon DSP and Kyro CPU to extract maximum performance. This is a better AI capability implementation on-chip as can be dynamically changed as per workload type and AI application leveraging three powerful sub-systems and thus is a much more advanced than competition.”
Commenting on future growth of AI capable smartphones, Senior Analyst, Jene Park, added,” Although native AI capabilities are present in premium segment smartphone SoCs for now, we estimate these capabilities to trickle down to high- to mid- tier segment of smartphones broadly, further driven by adoption of AI into other low-power non-smartphone IoT devices in near-to-mid-term. Thus, these AI powered SoCs will soon be seen in affordable flagship devices from Chinese smartphone makers, trying to keep up with the latest trends. According to our estimates, atleast one in three smartphones shipped in 2020 will have an SoC with native AI capabilities.”
Exhibit 2: Native AI capable smartphone shipment forecast by 2020
Analysis for the top 5 smartphone SoC vendors:
Qualcomm
Apple
MediaTek
Exhibit 3: Annual Revenue Growth of Smartphone SoC Vendor in Q3 2017
Samsung
HiSilicon (Huawei)
Background:
Counterpoint Technology Market Research is a global research firm specializing in Technology products in the TMT industry. It services major technology firms and financial firms with a mix of monthly reports, customized projects and detailed analysis of the mobile and technology markets. Its key analysts are experts in the industry with an average tenure of 13 years in the high-tech industry.
Analyst Contacts:
Neil Shah
+91 9930218469
Shobhit Srivastava
+91 9000831117
[email protected]
@shobhit07
Jene Park
+82 10 63833507
Counterpoint Research