Yoshida in China: Windfall orders from smartphones in China?

Taiwan’s MediaTek continues to expand its sales by piggybacking on China’s growing demand for smartphones.The slowdown of China’s economy is everyone’s concern, but MediaTek president C.J. Hsieh, during its Q2 earnings’ call earlier this week, painted a different picture.

MediaTek’s Q2 sales grew by 19.5 percent from Q1 to NT$23.44 billion.

Roughly half of MediaTek’s revenue came from mobile phone chips in the Q2. MediaTek shipped 21 million smartphone chips in Q2, higher than the company’s earlier estimate (“somewhere between 18 million and 20 million”), and the company remains bullish about the smartphone market. The MediaTek president expects to ship 30 million smartphone chips (at least; and possibly more) in Q3.

What’s driving such growth? The chauffeur here, according to Taiwan’s chip giant, is China’s smartphone market.

The word on the street is that Chinese branded and non-branded handset manufacturers are ramping up their orders for chips. Mediatek’s president said during the call that China-based telecom carriers are working with some branded vendors to push sales of smartphones to tier-3 and tier-4 cities in China, further expanding the smartphone market.


Count your chickens
Whether Apple is going to introduce its new iPad in Q3, and if so, how many the company plans to ship is a topic of intense speculation in the electronics industry.

Taiwan’s trade publication Digitimes, citing unnamed supply-chain sources, went out on a limb to predict 19.5 million iPad panels will be shipped in Q3, with 16 million slotted for new iPad models.

For the new iPad, Apple is believed to be increasing use of oxide TFT panels – manufactured by Sharp, while decreasing the ratio of Samsung Electronics’ amorphous silicon (a-Si) TFT panels.  

The presumed advantage of Oxide TFT panels is high-resolution technology with lower power consumption. It has higher electron mobility and can enhance pixels per inch and the refresh rate.
 


NO, China’s Lenovo is NOT buying Nokia
Blame the chatters on the Internet, blame market speculators.

Nokia’s shares rose as much as 17 percent earlier on Wednesday (August 1st), based on speculation that Lenovo might be interested. The rise, however stopped, after Gianfranco Lanci, responsible for Lenovo’s operations in Europe, Middle East and Africa, talked to Reuters and said, “This must be joke.”

Apparently, nothing is going on.

However, the story, if nothing else, illustrates the power of China’s Lenovo compared to Nokia’s fortune.  Lenovo today has a market capitalization of $7.1 billion and it has cash and cash equivalents of $3.8 billion.

Related stories:

-Teardown slideshow: Inside the third-generation iPad

-Multi-screen wars: MediaTek/Mstar vs. Qualcomm, Marvell, Nvidia

-Yoshida in China: Is China’s manufacturing sector slowing down?

-MediaTek to bring premier smartphone features to $150 - $200 handsets