The death of Renesas moves, the inevitable consequence of standing in the wrong camp

After Renesas Mobile Communications determined to withdraw from the mobile communications market and did not play, although it felt a pity, it was also a fact that had to be accepted. Although I do n’t know if there will be any other companies withdrawing in the future, what is certain is that as of now, TI (Texas Instruments) OMAP, ST-Ericsson to Renesas Mobile Communications and other international chip manufacturers have announced their withdrawal from this war. The fierce and cruel competition in the computing market is far beyond your imagination.

Photo: Once the mobile phone market share changes, the mobile communication chip industry will also be affected

After deducting TI, the background of the two companies from ST-Ericsson to Renesas Mobile Communications is actually quite similar. They are all to gain a place in the mobile communications field, so they have launched a M & A strategy and therefore have a fairly complete mobile chip solution. From the processor, modem and power management chip, it can be said to be almost complete, and even the time of mergers and acquisitions is quite early, at least all of them have completed related merger and acquisition operations around 2010. Since both can take merger and acquisition actions during the financial turmoil, and the two companies are also in a leading position in the process and technical strength, why is it still falling to this end? The answer is clear: the wrong treasure.

The three words seem simple, but behind the scenes, they also tell that the rapid changes in the global mobile communications market over the past three years have really surprised everyone. We ca n’t imagine that the mobile phone leaders Nokia and Motorola, which were all the rage, would be surpassed by Apple and Samsung in one fell swoop. We ca n’t even imagine that the mainland ’s local players, from chips to mobile phones, are almost all mobilized, hoping to obtain in the global mobile communications market. One place now, the top ten in the global smartphone market has already appeared in the names of Chinese industry players, but HTC has fallen out of the top ten, which was an ending that you and I could not have predicted three years ago.

After these times, if you carefully observe the mobile phone chips used by these mobile phone manufacturers, they are generally quite fixed and will not change much. As far as processors are concerned, except that Apple and Samsung use their own processors, it seems that Motorola used Freescale and TI products; Nokia is supplied by TI and Renesas Mobile Communications; HTC For the global market, Qualcomm is responsible, while in the Chinese market, some product lines are supplied by ST-Ericsson. Once the battle situation in the terminal mobile phone market has a decisive impact, chip manufacturers who play the role of suppliers cannot be unimpressed. After Nokia and Motorola, which were high in the past, were broken into the world, of course, chip suppliers were affected. Now that these chip manufacturers have withdrawn, these big cell phone manufacturers have to pay a little bit of responsibility.

As for Qualcomm, the reason for its leadership in the global mobile communications chip market is that it has invested considerable effort in the 3GPP standard, and has also put a lot of effort into interoperability testing with telecom operators. In addition, at the beginning, global first-line mobile phone manufacturers were willing to adopt Qualcomm's solutions when they introduced higher-speed standards in the initial stage. What's more, in the past, nearly half of Qualcomm's overall revenue was from 3G technology authorization, which is also not It is hard to guess that Qualcomm can have such a status today.

Looking at the whole, the linkage between the mobile communication market and the mobile phone market is extremely high. This is an indisputable fact. Since Samsung and Apple jointly obtained half of the market share, if the chip industry cannot enter the supply of these two mobile phone manufacturers. Chain, it is bound to compete for the eyes of the remaining 50% of the brand customer base, but do n’t forget, whether it is a processor or a baseband processor, the cost of investing in advanced processes is quite amazing. Of shipments to amortize its research and development costs and create profits, I am afraid that these chip manufacturers will face considerable challenges in operation.

As for the vast Chinese market, although the demand is staggering, MediaTek has been cultivating in the mainland for many years, and many local chip manufacturers in the mainland are rapidly emerging, and these international chip manufacturers are reluctant to take a price war. When you give up and withdraw from the mobile communications market, you can only say that this is an inevitable result. The reason why Elpida, a major memory manufacturer, went bankrupt was because there was no demand in the end market to support the operation of the entire company, but Elpida's strength in memory technology was obvious to all. The same is true for those who have withdrawn from the mobile communications market. Without strong support from the end market, no matter how excellent the technology is, it may not be able to achieve a leading position. For these chip manufacturers, choosing the right customer is probably a very important issue.