MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it is to supply new long-term-evolution (LTE) chips to India’s leading smartphone brand Micromax Informatics Inc as part of its efforts to boost its presence in the South Asian nation.
The partnership should help MediaTek — which mainly supplies handset chips to Chinese vendors such as Xiaomi Corp (小米) — expand its share of the global LTE market from 20 percent. The Hsinchu-based company aims to lift its global market share to between 30 percent and 40 percent, and its Chinese market share to 40 percent this year.
MediaTek is to supply its Helio 10X and MT6735 LTE chips for Micromax’s mid-to-premium range smartphones in line with the rising 4G adoption in India.
Micromax would be the first Indian smartphone vendor to use MediaTek’s Helio 10X chip. India is MediaTek’s second-largest market after China.
“India is the next 4G LTE smartphone battleground and key to MediaTek’s mission to power billions of devices globally,” Finbarr Moynihan, general manager of MediaTek’s international sales division, said in a company statement.
Strategy Analytics forecast that by 2017, India should overtake Japan to become the world’s third-largest LTE market and surpass the US to become the world’s second-largest smartphone market.
“We have always endeavored to offer products based on certain needs of the consumer. Moving forward, we will lead the 4G adoption in the country by converting all our popular Canvas series to 4G,” Micromax CEO Vineet Taneja said in the statement.
MediaTek has been investing in India since 2007. The company said it is the top smartphone system-on-a-chip supplier to Indian brands and enjoys the largest market share of chips in mobile devices sold there.
MediaTek shares fell 0.82 percent to NT$243 yesterday, while the TAIEX inched up 0.22 percent.
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