Qualcomm dominates cellular baseband market

Qualcomm dominated the global cellular baseband processor market in the second quarter, with its market share growing to a record 63%, according to a report from Strategy Analytics.

The total baseband market grew a modest 5.4% year on year to US$4.4 billion ($4.66 billion), Strategy Analytics estimates. But the market contracted quarter on quarter, due to a decline in shipments of basebands for feature phones.

Notably, smartphone baseband shipments outpaced feature phone basebands for the first time during the quarter. LTE and TD-SCDMA baseband shipments grew at a triple-digit rate. TD-SCDMA is the 3G standard used by China Mobile.

Qualcomm’s impressive showing during the quarter was driven by strong demand for its LTE and LTE-Advanced basebands, with LTE accounting for over 40% of the vendor’s total baseband shipments.

MediaTek took a distant second with a 13% share of shipments during the quarter, while Intel was third with 7%.

Christopher Taylor, director of the Strategy Analytics RF and Wireless Component service, said the market is still waiting for a second strong supplier to challenge Qualcomm.

“We believe that Intel, Broadcom, Ericsson, Marvell, MediaTek, NVIDIA and Spreadtrum have the potential to step in and capture multimode LTE share in 2014,” he said.

“However, these vendors have a difficult task ahead in challenging the current LTE market leader Qualcomm, which is moving swiftly with its highly integrated multimode LTE-A chips.”

Image courtesy of Yoshimasa Niwa under CC