Qualcomm, MediaTek and Samsung are found to have been the biggest mobile chipset sellers in 2019
Counterpoint Research has published its report on the smartphone SoC market for 2019. It focuses on the shares taken by the companies that make and sell these components, in which terms Qualcomm was found to have the lead.
The company also had the top spot in this market in 2018. However, its share was 35% in that year, whereas it fell to 33.4% in 2019. Similarly, MediaTek retained its #2 ranking in 2019, although its share fell by 1.1% year-on-year (YoY) to 24.6%. However, Samsung increased its share by 2.2% YoY, which enabled it to take the 3rd position from Apple in 2019.
Huawei's HiSilicon was the only other top-5 mobile semiconductor slinger to exhibit an increased share (+2.5% YoY) of its market in 2019. However, Counterpoint attributed its inability to grow even further to its fraught relationship with the US government, which may have held its sales back for most of the year in question.
In fact, most of HiSilicon's relative success appeared to come from its popularity in its home market. It had the 2nd-greatest share of the market in that country (behind Qualcomm), whereas it did not figure in the top 4 for other regions (such as North America, the EU and India) studied in this report.