NTT Docomo, Japan’s biggest mobile phone service
provider, will partner with South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and Japanese
firms such as NEC, Panasonic and Fujitsu to develop chips for smartphones.

The joint venture will pose challenges to the supremacy of Qualcomm in
the smartphone processor market.

 

Recently
Strategy Analytics announced that Qualcomm continued its dominant market
position in smartphone applications processors with 49 percent revenue share in
Q3 2011.

 

Docomo
will invest $5.8 million to create a subsidiary in preparation for the start of
the partnership.

Fabricating chips will help the companies reduce their reliance on components
supplied by Qualcomm, which dominates the market for semiconductors used in
smartphones.

 

The global smartphone applications processor market
registered a 59 percent year-on-year growth to reach $2.24 billion in Q3 2011.

 

Qualcomm led the smartphone applications processor market
in terms of both unit shipments and revenue during Q3 2011. Judging by numbers
of units sold, Samsung, Texas Instruments, Marvell and Broadcom made up the
rest of the top-five vendors. NVIDIA lost its number five position to Broadcom.

 

Stand-alone applications processors out-grew
baseband-integrated applications processors, accounting for 41 percent of total
smartphone applications processor shipments in Q3 2011, up from 31 percent in
the same quarter last year.

 

This growth can be attributed to strong demand for
dual-core processors and growth in LTE smartphone shipments. Qualcomm, a strong
advocate of baseband-integrated processors, now also participates in the
stand-alone applications processor market with its APQ8xxx-family of Snapdragon
processors.

 

By Telecomlead.com Team
[email protected]