The company is planning to double its tablet SoC shipments this year and it is seeing strong demand for smartphone chips, too. According to Digitimes, http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20140124PD208.html Chinese white-box smartphone makers are aggressively expanding and targeting emerging markets. Most of them rely on MediaTek chips and the company currently controls 60 to 70 percent of the local smartphone market. It is estimated that MediaTek managed to grab more than 50 percent of new orders for Q1 2014 from first tier and second tier smartphone makers in China.
This huge market is often overlooked. Samsung, Qualcomm and Nvidia chips tend to end up in high-end devices. Although Qualcomm rolled out a few cheap chips specifically designed or the Chinese market last year, MediaTek still reigns supreme in the mid- and low-end market. However, this doesn’t mean MediaTek is all about cheap chips. This year we should see A15/A7 big.LITTLE parts, A12 quads and LTE support in some MediaTek solutions.
MediaTek doesn’t want to lock horns with the likes of Qualcomm in the high-end market and for the time being its strategy seems to be paying off nicely. In 2012 MediaTek shipped 110 million smartphone chips and last year it doubled its shipments to 220 million units. This year it is expected to see at least 25 percent growth.
