The cellular baseband processor market fell 5 percent to $21.1 billion in 2015, according to Strategy Analytics.
Qualcomm, MediaTek, Spreadtrum, Samsung LSI and HiSilicon are the top-five baseband vendors in 2015.
Qualcomm’s share in baseband market dropped to 59 percent in 2015 from 66 percent in 2014. MediaTek has 20 percent and Spreadtrum has 6 percent revenue share in the global baseband market in 2015.
LTE baseband shipments reached over 1 billion in 2015 and registered strong double-digit growth while 2G and 3G baseband shipments declined significantly.
Qualcomm’s LTE unit share dropped to 63 percent as competitors MediaTek, Samsung LSI, HiSilicon, Spreadtrum, and Leadcore all improved their LTE shipments.
Qualcomm faced less success with Snapdragon 800 chips in 2015 compared to 2014. Qualcomm’s mid-range chips and slim modems performed well and featured in several high volume devices in 2015.
MediaTek’s LTE shipments registered over 400 percent growth in 2015, helped by MediaTek’s strong presence in China and its 64-bit mid-range product portfolio. MediaTek faced challenges from Spreadtrum in its 3G baseband business.
Samsung LSI, HiSilicon, Spreadtrum, and Leadcore made good progress in LTE basebands in 2015.
HiSilicon and Samsung LSI benefited from their traction at their respective in-house customers in 2015 at the expense of merchant baseband companies such as Qualcomm, while Leadcore benefited from its design-win at Xiaomi.
Intel is waiting for a high volume LTE design-win as the company continues to invest significantly in baseband technologies.
