The global cellular baseband processor market rose 5.4 percent year-over-year to reach $4.4 billion in the second quarter of 2013, according to Strategy Analytics. Qualcomm leads with 63 percent market share.
However, baseband unit shipments declined by 6.5 percent, which can be attributed to a decline in basebands for feature phones, during Q2 2013.
Telecom chip companies Qualcomm, MediaTek, Intel, Spreadtrum, and Broadcom captured the top-five revenue share rankings in the cellular baseband processor market in Q2 2013.
Qualcomm captured a record 63 percent revenue share in the cellular baseband market in Q2 2013, followed by MediaTek with 13 percent revenue share and Intel with 7 percent revenue share.
“LTE basebands accounted for over 40 percent of Qualcomm’s total baseband shipments in Q2 2013 and we expect Qualcomm to improve its LTE baseband mix as a percentage of its total baseband shipments further,” said Sravan Kundojjala, senior analyst, Strategy Analytics.
For the first time, smartphone basebands out-shipped feature phone basebands in Q2 2013. LTE and TD-SCDMA baseband shipments grew at a triple-digit rate, while GSM/GPRS/EDGE, UMTS, CDMA and iDEN baseband shipments all declined from the year-ago quarter.
Intel, Broadcom, Ericsson, Marvell, MediaTek, NVIDIA and Spreadtrum have the potential to step in and capture multimode LTE share in 2014.
However, these vendors have a difficult task ahead in challenging the current LTE market leader Qualcomm, which is moving swiftly with its highly integrated multi-mode LTE-A chips, the report said on Tuesday.
