Mediatek has come a long way since its inception as a small-time chip-maker for consumer electronics products like DVD players and digital televisions back in the late 90s. The company has been on a steep growth trajectory over the past several years, thanks mainly to the smartphone boom in countries like China and India. Meanwhile, even as China continues to remain the largest market for MediaTek, the company has now revealed that it expects over 10% of its annualized sales this year to come from the Indian market.
According to MediaTek’s senior director and sales head of emerging markets, Mr. Arthur Wang, India will likely be one of the most important pieces in the puzzle for the company in the foreseeable future. He also said that he expects the increased volumes as a result of the Indian wireless telecom scene transitioning from a 3G HSPA market to a 4G LTE market. In a recent interview to the Press Trust of India (PTI), Mr. Wang said, “In 2015, we shipped 400 million chipsets for smartphones and over 33 million were from India. This year, we expect India to contribute over 10 percent to the shipment as the adoption of 4G LTE grows in the country”. What’s important is that only 160 million of the 400 million chips MediaTek sold lat year were LTE-enabled, while the rest were just 3G chips.
Another important factor for MediaTek’s optimism in the Indian market is the expected growth in adoption for a nascent technology called VoLTE (Voice over LTE), thanks to the impending multi-billion dollar launch of a new carrier called Reliance Jio. All the leading carriers in the country, Airtel, Vodafone and Idea, already offer LTE connections in several hundred towns across India, but there are several hundred more that currently has to make do with slower, legacy technology. It remains to be seen which carrier emerges the winner in the Indian telecom scene once the dust settles, but MediaTek wouldn’t be the least bit worried about that as long as the company’s LTE-enabled chips continue to power an increasing number of handsets being used by smartphone-owners in the country with the world’s second-largest number of mobile users.