Cellular chips 3Q07 Update

Worldwide cellular chip market revenues for 3Q 2007 touched an estimated $2,063 million. An estimated 141 million chips were shipped during the quarter.

The market was led by Texas Instruments which took market share of around 24%. That lead was followed by Qualcomm, Freescale, Broadcom and STMicrosystems in that order. Together these five generated around 69% of the total revenues generated by cellular chip sales.

Compared to 2Q 2007, revenues and shipments for the cellular chip market were up by 8% q-o-q. Qualcomm was the only chip manufacturer which saw some increase in the revenue shares among the top 5 cellular chip vendors. Perhaps the reason behind this could be the decreasing average margins per chip in the GSM space, and that would not have affected Qualcomm with the vendor being into CDMA.

Cellular Chips 3Q07 section of the upcoming quarterly chip update tracks the shipment of chips that are mainly used in handsets and core network elements in cellular technologies that include GSM, CDMA, and 3G.