MediaTek Inc.has recently received notification to send the sample of its MT6589 quad-core processors to be tested at Sony Mobile,likely breaking Qualcomm Inc.'s monopoly in the Sony Mobile supply chain.
Although Sony Mobile has not yet placed orders with MediaTek for the chips,industry executives viewed the chip verification as a significant milestone for the Taiwanese fabless house in the competition with world's No.1 wireless chip vendor.
They estimated MediaTek to ship at least 200 million sets of smartphone chips in 2013,surging two folds from 2012.
Samsung and Apple are currently the world's top two smartphone suppliers,but Apple uses chips developed on its own while Samsung use self-developed chips and chips from Qualcomm and ST-Ericsson.
Sony Mobile and HTC Corp.have mostly depended on Qualcomm for the chips,rejecting many times MediaTek's approaches with its chips.
In mainland China,homegrown smartphone makers ZTE Corp.,Lenovo Group Ltd.and Huawei Technologies Co.,Ltd.have begun building MediaTek chips into their products.Internationally,MediaTek has numbered only Motorola Inc.,Sharp Corp.and Acer Inc.among its customers.
Thanks to increasing orders for its chips,MediaTek has recently again raised its shipment goal to 110 million sets of smartphone chips for 2012.
Market research organization TrendForce forecast mainland Chinese brand-name vendors to ship a total of 300 million smartphones in 2013,surging 50%from 2012 and accounting for around 34%of the global market.Gartner forecast three out of the world's top five smartphone vendors will come from the mainland in 2014.
