Qualcomm Dominates the Mobile Phone Chip Market and Becomes the God of the Mobile Industry

Qualcomm's initial goal was to create "high-quality communication devices". Now it seems that Qualcomm's hardware can be seen in almost all important brands of smartphones in the U.S. market.

Even maverick apple, which designs its own mobile processor, has no choice but to use Qualcomm's LTE modem. Of course, Samsung is no exception. In fact, Samsung's exynos chip has been replaced by Qualcomm's snapdragon chip in the United States and some other markets. However, Qualcomm's influence is quietly expanding and deepening step by step.

A week ago, Verizon launched the Motorola Droid turbo phone as the carrier's flagship phone during the holiday sales season. This new phone is equipped with the Android operating system, other configurations are of the highest specification, supports the Motorola turbo charger fast charging function, and can provide 8 hours of battery life for this phone in 15 minutes. The same accessories are also bundled with another Motorola product, the nexus 6.

At the same time, HTC also launched a similar competitive product rapid charger. Samsung also provides a powerful charging function for Galaxy note 4 devices. All these branding and marketing are just labeled with the same label: Qualcomm quick charge 2.0 power adapter.

Other configurations of the droid turbo phone include a 2.7ghz snapdragon 805 chip processor. Like all other non iPhone flagship phones on the market in the past two years, the droid turbo phone also uses Qualcomm's latest processor.

In fact, in the U.S. smartphone market in 2013 and 2014, LG's G2 and G3, Sony's Xperia Z1, Z2 and Z3, Google's nexus 5 and 6, HTC's HTC one, and Samsung's Galaxy phones all used Qualcomm's various multi-core processors. Outside the Android Kingdom, the windows phone system only relies on Qualcomm's snapdragon processor.

To some extent, Microsoft also requires potential mobile phone manufacturers to use Qualcomm reference design as a guideline for the production of mobile phones. In addition, snapdragon is also the default chip of BlackBerry products. For example, the latest passport device of BlackBerry uses a 2.2GHz snapdragon 801 processor.

It is believed that Google and apple are the main driving forces in the field of mobile innovation, while Qualcomm only plays the role of designer in promoting the change of mobile technology. HTC's sensor hub enables one smartphone motion launch and dot view to work. However, without the support of Qualcomm snapdragon sensor engine, the sensor hub will not work.

At present, the standard of smartphone life time mainly refers to Sony's Xperia Z3 and Z3 compact phones, both of which are equipped with snapdragon 801 processor. Calum Macdougall, head of product marketing at Sony Xperia, admitted that only the processor is the key accessory to improve battery efficiency and battery life.

Last year, before the launch of some nexus devices, Motorola has been trying to update moto x to Android 4.4. In the process, Qualcomm has won a good reputation again. This summer, Steve Horowitz, Motorola's software business director, explained in an interview that "great cooperation" with snapdragon processor manufacturers is the secret weapon for Motorola's rapid software upgrade.

It seems unlikely to find a smartphone manufacturer that does not praise Qualcomm. HTC calls its chip supplier a "vital partner", while LG also claims that "it has a great partnership with Qualcomm, and the two companies respect each other very much."

LG also claimed that "there was a time when other manufacturers were active in the chip field, but Qualcomm's innovation was an important reason to promote the company's high-end position in the chip industry."

The core innovation driving Qualcomm's current dominant position in the chip industry is the LTE modem, which even apple can't give up. Snapdragon chip system integrates this modem and application processor into a simple chip, which also improves the chip processing efficiency, which is higher than similar products of other competitors in terms of space and power requirements, and makes Qualcomm chip the choice of most mobile phone manufacturers. These days, mobile phone manufacturers are choosing different models of snapdragon processors instead of processors from other chip manufacturers.

NVIDIA is still struggling in the chip market with its Tegra series chips. Despite the good performance of the new Tegra K1 processor in nexus 9 and shield tablet, NVIDIA actually withdrew from the smartphone market. The Tegra 3 processor used in HTC one X products in 2012 was only NVIDIA's last effort to block the take-off of Qualcomm's snapdragon chip. In fact, snapdragon gradually became the mainstream mobile chip processor at that time. When the mobile phone equipped with Qualcomm chip was launched in the U.S. market, the industry finally realized how important it is to integrate the chip with LTE connection function.

Although Qualcomm enjoys a good reputation in smartphone manufacturing, facts also show that, as the only processor supplier with competitive advantage, Qualcomm has insufficient choice of chips, which has also aroused concerns in the industry.

Huawei has developed its own quad core processor, and Samsung continues to produce long-running exynos series processors. In addition, LG has just announced an eight core nucleus processor. However, LG also issued a statement soon, saying that "our nucleus processor can provide us with more flexibility, but it can never replace Qualcomm snapdragon chip."

Qualcomm currently has an impeccable leading edge in the field of mobile chips. If no other manufacturer in the industry can produce better and more effective LTE solutions, Qualcomm's leading position will be difficult to shake. Intel has been trying to surpass Qualcomm. In addition, MediaTek has achieved some success in entry-level smartphone chips. Nevertheless, Qualcomm's share in the smartphone market has been high due to the strong support of snapdragon technology.

What makes Qualcomm's potential competitors even more daunting is that the company is also moving into areas such as smart watches and other connectable devices. LG's g watch r product is equipped with a snapdragon 400 chip processor, which greatly exceeds the outdated Texas Instruments processor of moto 360. Even gear s (Samsung's product trying to get rid of Google's Android system) can't do without snapdragon chip.

The industry believes that the motherboards of more than 1 billion devices are expected to use Qualcomm's 3G or 4G technology by the end of this year. Qualcomm currently expects that the company's annual net profit may reach tens of billions of dollars, and its net profit in the latest fiscal quarter also exceeded $2.24 billion.

In order to occupy the highest position in the mobile field, Qualcomm has done many right things and rarely made mistakes. In the battle between WiMAX and LTE for next-generation mobile Internet technology, Qualcomm chose the right side. Qualcomm has integrated new features into its silicon wafers, which will help Qualcomm's partners and benefit end users. Qualcomm's progress has been gradual for a company that now has an outstanding position in God.

In the highly competitive mobile market, of course, competition has always existed. However, mobile innovation in today's era, whether droid turbo, HTC sensor hub or lumia refocus related products, is based on Qualcomm chips.