Qualcomm has tightened its grip on the smartphone processor chip market, accounting for more than half of all sales, with new research revealing the sector grew 40 percent to €13.14 billion last year.
Strategy Analytics said Qualcomm increased its market share to 54 percent thanks to its LTE-integrated Snapdragon chips.
Apple sat far behind in second with a 16 percent share as its first 64-bit processor, the A7, gained “significant” traction in the second half of 2013.
Media-Tek’s focus on smartphones under €145 and success with its 28 nm-based quad-core chips pushed it into third place. Samsung and Spreadtrum were fourth and fifth respectively, with the latter achieving double-digit volume share in the applications processor market for the first time.
Stuart Robinson, Director of the Strategy Analytics Handset Component Technologies service, said MediaTek and Spreadtrum registered “significant” growth and together captured about one-third volume market share.
However, he said they will have to focus on high-end LTE and global markets for further growth.
Meanwhile, there was more modest growth, of 8.3 percent, in the global cellular baseband processor market, which hit sales of €13.79 billion last year.
Qualcomm dominated again, with a share of 64 percent, followed by MediaTek (12 percent) and Intel (eight percent).
Senior Analyst Sravan Kundojjala commented: “The LTE baseband landscape is expected to be a crowded one in 2014 with several vendors including Broadcom, Ericsson, Intel, Marvell, MediaTek, NVIDIA, Spreadtrum and others are all set to bring commercial multi-mode LTE chip products to the market and this could help drive LTE down into mid-to-low tier devices.”
There was better growth in the tablet processor market, with the sector up 32 percent to €2.6 billion last year. Apple dominated with a 37 percent share, followed by Qualcomm (11 percent) and Samsung (10 percent).