MediaTek has put out their January 2017 revenue figures, and the amount on show is an 11-month low for the company, the worst consolidated revenue figures they’ve posted since before they began an upward trend last January. The drop represented a 14.1% decrease year on year from last January, and drove their stock prices down about 2.1% after the figures were released. At a recent meeting, MediaTek Vice Chairman Ching-jiang Hsieh said that the pattern is likely to continue throughout the first quarter of the year, with similar or worse downturns projected sequentially until the first quarter is over. A number of factors, including a strengthening US dollar, brought January’s figure down to NT$18.31 billion, a 14.2% month on month decrease from December of 2016.
First quarter revenues are expected to be around the NT$53.6 billion to NT$59.1 billion area due to falling sales of MediaTek’s chipsets. Projections put the sales at somewhere between 105 million and 115 million units, with sales of their high-end chips waning and low-end chips leaving the Chinese market in fewer and fewer forms. The upcoming release of their flagship Helio X30 chip is quite likely turn MediaTek’s bad fortunes upside down, and is pegged for some time in the second quarter of the year. Though the release of a new flagship product is a boon for any company most of the time, nothing can be said for certain at this point. Vernee’s Apollo 2 is set to be the first phone sporting the chip, but a release date for it is not set at this time.
Looking further into the future, while Q2 of 2017 will likely only benefit partially from the Helio X30, the third quarter of the year is probably where the chip will hit its stride. Looking back, a similar release window for the flagship Helio X20 chip saw revenues jump a bit as the first few phones to get the chip were being supplied and manufactured, and then the release of the Zopo Speed 8, the first Helio X20 phone, put revenues on an upward track from its February reveal on through the rest of the year, up until a decline from October onward, when manufacturers began to anticipate the Helio X30. Looking back further, the Helio X10 spurred a somewhat similar pattern, which means that, despite the somewhat larger than usual dip this January, this is essentially business as usual for MediaTek, whose figures live and die by their flagship chipsets’ release windows.