US teardown specialist iSuppli reckons that the latest figures out of Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, means that Texas is no longer the largest supplier of wireless chips.
By its latest calculations that sub-market for semiconductors is one of the fastest growing, with overall semiconductors growing at around 3%, and wireless up around 7.6%. So for either company, getting more out of wireless means getting more growth.
iSuppi pegged the industry for wireless semiconductors at $29.5 billion for 2007and includes application-specific semiconductors, not counting memory, in mobile handsets, wireless infrastructure equipment and wireless LANs.
Handset shipments jumped 16% in 2007, so despite price erosion this keeps this semiconductor market hot with six of the top 10 suppliers achieving double digit revenue increases ‘ but not TI.
Revenue last quarter for Texas was $3.27 billion, up just 3%, from a year ago, with most of it semiconductor revenue. By comparison Qualcomm’s quarter was $2.61 billion, up 17% with some $1.73 of that in equipment and services rather than royalty revenues, around half the size of TI.
iSuppli had already reported that Texas was slipping behind in earlier mid year figures, but now confirms that this is the first time that Qualcomm has stayed ahead for a year and says that within Qualcomm, wireless components grew even faster than the company as a whole, by 24.1% on the back of carving out dominant positions in HSPA chips to go with its captive EvDO market share. In total it supplied 19.1% of wireless chips during 2007 compared to 16.7% for Texas, down 7.7%
Texas has been hit by both Nokia aggressively shifting away from reliance on a single supplier, now spreading its strategic component purchasing across 4 chip markers, while Ericsson has done much the same by using STMicroelectronics components in infrastructure for some of its 3G baseband platforms.
On the back of this STMicroelectronics surged to the number 3 ranking with a 14.4% rise in wireless revenue, while Infineon posted an impressive 54.3% gain.