The Taiwan-based chipmaker attributed the gains to strong performance in March. MediaTek reported $1.53bn Q1 consolidated revenue, with nearly three fifths of the revenue coming in March.
MediaTek’s March madness
The company said March sales were up 110 percent, making last month the most profitable for the company since October 2014. Year-on-year, March sales were up 17%.
A couple of factors led to the near-record performance in March. February is traditionally a very slow month in Asia, due to Lunar New Year holidays. As far as MediaTek products go, we can only speculate that shipments of Android TV parts and low-cost MT67xx smartphone chips also played a part.
However, due to seasonal trends, MediaTek’s Q1 shipments were down about 15% from Q4 2014.
Chinese smartphone makers boosting inventory
Moving forward, Chinese clients are expected to stock up in time for another seasonal trend – the Mayday shopping spree.
However, aside from the usual seasonal trends, MediaTek has a number of things going for it, namely strong demand for its 64-bit LTE chips and the imminent launch of several new products. Some of these new SoCs feature global LTE, which should make them more competitive in markets aside from Asia.
Even without them, MediaTek’s 64-bit MT67xx parts have already attracted a couple of big brands, namely Lenovo, HTC and Meizu. As for second-tier Chinese smartphone brands, nearly all of them use MediaTek silicon in new $100-$300 products.
Moving forward
The company is positioned quite well and ready to take advantage of several industry trends over the next few quarters.
In addition to Android TV sales, MediaTek is pinning its hopes on new 64-bit smartphone SoCs, which will feature Cortex-A72 CPU cores and new Helio branding. Some of them will be manufactured in 20nm, presumably by TSMC.
However, even before these new parts come online, MediaTek will have a few tweaked Cortex-A53 products with improved capabilities. The popular MT6752, which we recently had a chance to test in the Mlais M52 phablet, is currently being complemented by the MT6753 variant, with global Cat 4 FDD and TD-LTE. Global LTE is coming to low-end parts too, in the form of the MT6735 and MT6735M SoCs. These quad-core Cortex-A53 parts with Mali-T720 MP4 graphics are expected to ship this quarter.
Intel is also planning to aggressively enter the Chinese smartphone market, but while some of its 28nm SoFIA parts feature promising specs, all but one lack LTE support. This fact should give MediaTek some breathing room, although Intel will pose a long-term threat in some market segments.
