Qualcomm recently reported strong quarterly results that made the US chip provider appear immune to the challenges of geopolitics and supply chain disruption. However, it may have been overtaken in its core market – for smartphone system-on-chip (SoC) – by its biggest rival, Taiwan’s MediaTek. MediaTek claims it has taken the top spot in the smartphone SoC market this year, which would be a significant turnaround from 2018, when the company was defocusing on smartphones and putting much of its efforts into areas, such as wearables chips, where it had less daunting competition from Qualcomm. CEO Rick Tsai told a recent investor conference: “We are now the largest smartphone SoC maker globally.” And he was careful to stress that this…