MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the nation’s biggest mobile phone chip supplier, yesterday posted a 2.52 percent rise in revenue for last month from May on growing demand for smartphone chips, which brought the company’s second-quarter revenue at the higher end of the chipmaker’s target range.
Revenue rose to NT$7.85 billion (US$262 million) last month, from NT$7.65 billion in May, which Credit Suisse analyst Randy Abrams said was slightly higher than his estimate of NT$7.71 billion.
Last month’s sales represented an increase of 16.4 percent from NT$6.74 billion a year earlier, according to MediaTek’s statement on its Web site.
In the April-to-June period, revenue grew about 20 percent to NT$23.44 billion, compared with NT$19.62 billion in the first quarter, company data indicated.
On April 27, MediaTek told investors at a conference that it forecast revenue would expand to a range of between NT$22.4 billion and NT$23.5 billion in the second quarter, after customers started using its new chips for smartphones and feature phones.
At that time, MediaTek president Hsieh Ching-jiang (謝清江) said the company’s growth this quarter would be supported by growing migration to low-cost smartphones, by users mostly in China, from feature phones.
The company counts China Mobile Ltd (中國移動), Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) and TCL Alcatel among its about 40 clients.
Credit Suisse said it estimated MediaTek’s smartphone chip shipments would double to 20 million units in the second quarter from the first quarter’s 10 million units, citing China’s white-box and branded handset makers having adopted the Taiwanese firm’s MT6575 and MT6573 chips for their Android smartphones, while MediaTek has begun shipping new dual-core chip MT6577 for low-cost smartphones.
For this quarter, Abrams predicted the handset chipmaker’s revenue would grow 15 percent sequentially to NT$26.75 billion.
In a separate statement, Macronix International Co Ltd (旺宏電子), which supplies memory chips to Japanese video game console maker Nintendo Co, yesterday said revenue dropped 4.88 percent to NT$1.95 billion last month from NT$2.05 billion in the previous month.
That brought the chipmaker’s second-quarter revenue to NT$5.8 billion, an increase of 14 percent from NT$5.083 billion in the first three months of the year.
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