MediaTek seeks to boost India market share in smartphone chipsets

NEW DELHI: Taiwanese semiconductor company MediaTek is looking to boost its share in the Indian smartphone market where rising demand for 4G network is likely to push down prices of LTE handsets.

MediaTek is bringing its complete portfolio of voice over LTE- and voice over Wi-Fi-ready 4G chipsets through its Indian and Chinese handset partners, which are likely to launch smartphones in coming months, said Arthur Wang, MediaTek’s senior director, head of emerging markets, international corporate sales.

In India, US-based Qualcomm is the leader in the smartphone chipset business.

“I see healthy growth this year compared to last year. We had 35% market share last year in the Indian mobile market, and we are looking to maintain the same, but with a significant increase in our 4G market share,” Wang said. In 2015, the company’s overall handset chipset sales grew by about 12% while the smartphone segment saw 15% increase from a year ago.

Wang said the feature phone business will stay flat, but smartphone business will go up significantly, with LTE contributing almost half of the chipset shipments this year.

Of the 102 million smartphones shipped to India in 2015, 35 million were running on MediaTek chipsets, of which 5 million were LTE-enabled, according to Kuldeep Malik, country head-corporate sales, India, at MediaTek.

Malik said India accounted for about 8-10% of MediaTek’s total smartphones shipments, while LTE shipments were 3-4% of the company’s global LTE shipments in 2015.