Qualcomm And MediaTek For An All India 5G Battle (Image: Pixabay)
The world’s second biggest smartphone market – India, is witnessing a battle between top chipmakers. Qualcomm, American multinational corporation, also the world’s top smartphone chipmaker is in a duel with MediaTek, a Taiwanese semiconductor and chip making company, to consolidate a major share of the 5G market in India. Though the consolidation of market is in the plan, a top executive of Qualcomm said that, a price war was not to be expected.
On this, the Qualcomm India president Savi Soin, said, “We need to see where our customer is going, and not where our competition is going, as we are a leader. We are a tenacious competitor, but we want to show there’s value on our platform, and it’s not about selling a chip and engaging in a price war.” He told this at an interview to the ET.
Savi Soin is currently heading Qualcomm India. He took charge in August, and is since then, planning and rearranging matters so as to deliver better support to the Indian clients with the 5G services rollout and rising demand for phones in the premium section.
The central point of the battle is the quick rise which is expected in the 5G mobile phone base installed in the country. As per the India Cellular & Electronics Association (ICEA), India’s installed 5G mobile phone base is expected to cross over by two-fold to about 500 million by the close of 2025, in December. These numbers are from a projected 150 million for 2023, December, and over a make up of, over 70 percent of the smartphone base in total, said the ET.
Mr. Soin said that Qualcomm, the American chipmaker, and Indian telecommunication giants – Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel are cooperating closely on matters to price-points and use cases so as to support the adoption of 5G services in a huge scale in the country.
A research by Counterpoint projects that 5G devices will fill up 94 and 99 percent of the whole smartphone range which would be sold in the country in the years 2024 and 2025 respectively. This is for the price range of Rs. 10K to Rs 20K.
Cybermedia Research says that, in the year 2023’s Q3, as many as 3.8 million premium smartphones which were powered by Qualcomm and based above the price range of Rs 25K was shipped to India, which took a 35 percent share of the market. While this was Qualcomm, MediaTek took a market share of 31 percent in terms of volume.
Also, Q3 of 2023 saw 1.8 million super premium smartphones of Qualcomm based on the price range above Rs. 50K being shipped to India leading to a market share of 37 percent while MediaTek captured a 10 percent share of the market, the data revealed. The premium and super-premium smartphone segments of the country has shown a growth of 36 and 91 percent year on year in Q3.
The undergoing rejigs of the organisation, Mr. Soin said, was to see that they had the “right people in the right roles,” and also, on the engineering side, to have the right supportive organisation, so as to capture and strengthen the 5G adoption in India.
He said, “we are organising ourselves to help operators like Jio and Airtel understand what use cases are driving 5G adoption that the retail consumers and enterprises really want. Private 5G (networks) is another area where there are lots of opportunities for operators to increase ARPU (average revenue per user) and revenue per business.” Both, Jio and Airtel are expected to finish the 5G rollout shortly, on a national level.
Mr. Soin also said that the chipmaker has its focus on the IoT (internet of things) space, as it is a huge opportunity in market terms from the Make in India viewpoint. He added that, the company’s objective was to “enable the next-generation of Indian entrepreneurs to develop use cases in these fields on the Qualcomm platform.”
Qualcomm, the American multinational corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, has been lining up organisationally, so as to bring powerful use cases and independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers, who are into pioneering work on digital health, AI, 5G and mobile computing, reported the ET.
