Mobile SoC specialist MediaTek has reported April revenue fell 34% sequentially to NT$28.35 billion (US$924 million). Revenue for the first four months of 2023 totaled about NT$124 billion, down 36.5% from a year earlier.
Apple has turned out to be the only brand handset vendor with positive revenue growth in the first quarter of 2023, mainly driven by rapidly rising market shares for iPhones in emerging countries such as India, Indonesia, and Turkey. This means a major setback for Android-camp players and also indicates that the basic demand for mobile SoCs that can be shared by Qualcomm and MediaTek in these markets is also getting smaller and smaller, according to market observers.
With unclear business outlook from Taiwan s mobile SoC vendor MediaTek, its backend partners including ASE Technology, Powertech Technology (PTI), Sigurd Microelectronics and King Yuan Electronics (KYEC) are all downbeat about their business prospects for the second quarter, with backend capacity demand for handset chips to be deferred to the second half of the year, according to industry sources.
British silicon IP provider Arm reportedly has notified its major customers about a sharp adjustment in its future licensing fee collection mechanism starting 2024, when the fee will be calculated based on the value of each end product instead of the price of each system-on-chip (SoC) sold by chipmakers. The move is expected to heap operation pressure on designers of ICs, particularly handset APs, according to industry sources.