Where is Huawei's China Core?

In 2014, the smart phone market continued to boom. At the beginning of this year, the global smartphone shipments exceeded 1 billion units each year, and various research institutions also forecast that the global smart phone shipments in 2014 will reach 1.2 billion units. Against this background, the core components of smart phones have become the focus of competition among major manufacturers.

There is huge profit behind huge mobile phone shipments. As a core Chinese company, Huawei is one of the few companies with independent research and development of mobile phone chips. So where does Huawei's Chinese core go?

Smartphone market trend forecast

Global smart phone shipment forecast for each year (data from IDC)

From the table, we can clearly see that smartphone shipments will continue to grow in the coming years, which will also directly promote the shipment of smart phone chips.

Mobile phone chip market status

As the two major suppliers of mobile phone chips, Qualcomm and MediaTek occupy the majority of smart phone processor chip shares, and will continue to exert force in 2015. As two major handset chip makers, they have firmly gripped the high-end and low-end markets of the market.

Qualcomm: A big mountain in the chip world

Qualcomm, which started with a communications chip, has deep technology accumulation in this field. Its "five-mode, ten-frequency" baseband chip is compatible with all mainstream network standards of 2G, 3G and 4G. With this advantage, Qualcomm has become the market leader in the baseband chip market. The importance of the baseband chip also reflects the changes in the market structure. With the advantages of baseband chips, Qualcomm launched the "Nine Dragons" processor with integrated baseband chips, application processors and graphics processors. The Snapdragon processor has been widely adopted by the mainstream flagship mobile phones, which has made Qualcomm a market leader in mobile processors.

Qualcomm recently launched a comprehensive attack on the global 4G mobile phone chip market, not only continuing to invest in high-profile mobile phone chip R&D, opening gaps with competitors, but also starting to focus on mid-to-low-end mobile phone chips, and even leading the killing price to prepare competitors. Feeling pressure.

MediaTek: grassroots sticks to the low end

When it comes to MediaTek, the two strongest companies, from the 2G era to the 3G era, they used the "turnkey" total solution to firmly occupy most of the low-end market. At the end of last year, MediaTek released eight-core processors and officially entered the high-end market. It is understood that with the introduction of low-priced eight-core mobile phones by cell phone manufacturers such as Xiaomi, Coolpad, Huawei, and Lenovo, MediaTek's eight-core processors are increasingly moving toward low prices, which is contrary to the original intention of entering the high-end market.

Some analysts pointed out that MediaTek's march into the global 3G/4G mobile phone chip market still took a tight look at Qualcomm's strategy, including chip solutions, product specifications, and technology blueprints. MediaTek has all stepped up its gap with Qualcomm and delivered bright revenue. In 2015, MediaTek should adopt the same strategy to continue its product, technology, cost, and market in 4G mobile phone chip solutions, and it will be shorter than Qualcomm.

From the above analysis and introduction, it can be seen that the competition of the two major mobile phone chip giants is fierce enough. Then will Huawei's new Kirin 625 and Kirin 925 brands be successively introduced into the mobile phone chip market this year?

Where is the Huawei chip?

To say where Huawei's Chinese core is going, we must first understand what mobile phone is equipped with a Huawei mobile phone chip. According to incomplete statistics, most mobile phones on the market use Qualcomm and MediaTek processors, and most of Huawei's processors are used on their own mobile phones. It is worth mentioning here that even Samsung, which has a strong chip R&D and manufacturing capability, has adopted a large number of Qualcomm chips. It can be seen that the mobile phone market has been firmly gripped by the two giants. Through these analyses, the market share of Huawei mobile phones can largely reflect Huawei’s chip’s share in the mobile phone market.

Mobile phone brand market share

From the figure, it can be clearly seen that Huawei's mobile phone market share is 8%, and Huawei's mobile phones do not all use their own chips, showing that Huawei's road is a long way to go.

Huawei mobile phone chip dynamic and next year layout

Huawei released its first 64-bit eight-core SOC on December 3, 2014, and its model is the Kirin 620. The Kirin 620 is based on the 64-bit eight-core Cortex-A53 architecture and is based on the 28nm process. Huawei said that the Cortex-A53's performance is 40% better than the Cortex-A7 at the same frequency. In addition, the 64-bit software architecture compares to 32-bit software. Performance increased by an average of 25%. According to the first 64-bit eight-core processor, Huawei's Kylin 620 has a strong performance.

In terms of high-end processors, Huawei also released an upgraded version of the Kirin925 Kirin 920. Although it is an upgraded version, the actual specifications of the Kirin 925 do not change much compared to the Kirin 920. It is still a quad-core Cortex-A7+ quad-core Cortex. -A15 architecture design, clocked at 1.8GHz, with Mali-T628MP4 GPU, so the performance and Kirin 920 should be comparable.

Huawei has laid out its own chips in the low-end and mid-to-high end. Currently, the Unicorn 620 is equipped with the 4X on the glory and the Unicorn 925 is equipped with the latest flagship glory on the 6 Plus.

Speaking of Huawei's mobile phone chip plan next year, it will also consider the low-end and high-end markets. In terms of low-end processors, Yin Long, president of Huawei's International Business Department, said in an interview that he expects Hassile’s explosive entry-level chips to be launched in the first or second quarter of 2015. For high-end processors, the Kirin 930 will be available by the end of the first quarter of next year. This is a flagship 64-bit processor Kirin 930, which uses an eight-core big. The LITTLE architecture design should include an eight-core Cortex-A57 core and eight Cortex-A53 cores. The integrated baseband chip supports LTE Cat. 6 specifications.

Despite the fierce competition in the mobile phone chip market, the favorable environment is that the continued withdrawal of overseas giants has freed up space for domestic manufacturers. It is very difficult for mobile phone chips to completely innovate independently, and the time cost and R&D costs are high. For example, in the construction of patents, Qualcomm has gone ahead of China for 5 to 10 years and formed a strict patent protection system. It is more difficult for Chinese companies to bypass patents on high-pass. From a technical point of view, the chip design process of domestic manufacturers has yet to be improved.

The lack of a core is just a representation. The lack of patent is the real reason. From Xiaomi to go abroad and India was banned from selling to Qualcomm's monopoly case, it all explains that Chinese companies lack patents. However, as a rare domestic company with patented technology and capable of independently researching and manufacturing mobile phone chips, Hass's development has an extremely far-reaching impact on the full autonomy of domestic mobile phones.