China's CCID Consulting, has reported that with the drive of export and domestic demands, China's mobile phone output continues to grow in 2007, reaching 554 million sets, with a growth rate of 25.4%. The export volume wass 322 million sets, which accounts for 58.2% of all phones made in the country. Currently, China's global mobile phone manufacturing base is quite steady. Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson have transferred their capacities to China; because of this factor, the export volume of China's mobile phone increases 26.2%. Meanwhile, China's domestic mobile phone enterprises' capacity increases are evident, especially ZTE, Huawei and K-Touch.

The size of China's mobile phone chip market reached 84.41 billion Yuan in 2007, up 23.9% over 2006.

As for mobile phone market's application structure, baseband processor module has the largest share, which accounts for 26.5%; with multimedia functions becoming more sophisticated, multimedia applied chip's share is 21.6%; although mobile phones' storage increases, affected by storage prices' drop and MCP applications' increase, storage's share reflects a downslide trend, which has decreased from 24.2% in 2006 to 19.4% in 2007

  In recent years, single chip solutions' application grows rapidly; affected by this, the shares of power management chip and RF module decrease. Besides, affected by the increase of smart phones, GPS mobile phones, Bluetooth/WiFi function mobile phones and application processors, market share of wireless connection chip and other chips increases and is likely to keep increasing in future years.

Mobile phones' baseband chip is the core of mobile phones' hardware, the integration of its components will directly affect the change of mobile phone platform's structure. Mobile phone baseband chip market can be divided into seven types, with DBB+ABB enjoying a larger market share. Chief users include Qualcomm, NXP, Agere, Broadcom, Freescale, Infineon and MTK; the next is DBB/ABB+PM, adopted by TI and ST; with the increase of low cost mobile phones, ABB+ABB+RF+PMU market grows rapidly, whose market share is 10.4%. As for market development in recent years, with integration in baseband chips, the shares of single chip solution DBB+ABB+RF+PMU and integrated application processor DBB+APP solution increase

Excluding smart phones, the more sophisticated requirements for mobile phones lead to higher capacity requirements for chips. In order to follow this trend, mobile phone chip has two development trends: mobile phone baseband chip improves integration, which not only supports some kinds of communications standards, but also provides multimedia functions and is applied in the interface of multimedia display, image sensor and audio devices, such as MTK's 6226 solution. The other is coprocessor's integration development, which is applied in MP3 and image processing, and it will have more multimedia functions; meanwhile, mobile phones' basic communications module's single chip solution will accelerate the evolution.

Domestic Chip Manufacturers Need to be Strengthened

As for brand structure, mobile phone platform chip manufacturers have high positions such as TI, Qualcomm, Infineon, NXP and MTK. Besides, storage manufacturers such as Samsung, Intel and Spansion, and manufacturers with abundant product lines such as ST and RFMD also have important positions in the market. As for development ability, 3G chip manufacturers and application processor manufacturers have strong development abilities.

China's domestic mobile phone chip enterpises' shares are low. Because China's mobile phone chip design has a late start, its products focus on mobile phone multimedia chip, such as MP3 decoder chip, image processor chip and chord chip, and its downstream customers are domestic mobile phone production enterprises, but it is difficult to enter supply systems of international mobile phone manufacturers such as Nokia and Motorola. However, with the increase of domestic mobile phones' output and the development of multimedia mobile phones and 3G businesses, domestic mobile phone chip manufacturers have great potentials over the next few years. 3G, multimedia application and smart phones are not only impetus of mobile phone chip market, but also the development opportunities for domestic chip manufacturers.

In future years, China's mobile phone chip market will follow China's mobile phone output and enter steady growth. China's mobile phone chip market will break through 100 billion Yuan in 2009, and it is forecasted that the market will reach 146.13 billion Yuan in 2012. 2G/2.5G era mobile phones consider voice as major part, core chip is baseband. Multimedia and business application will be more and more applied in 3G era. Therefore, with the enlargement of 3G mobile phones' output, multimedia application chip, storage ship and wireless connection chip market should grow rapidly.

Source:cellular-news