After South Korean phone maker refused to incorporate Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 chipset in favor of its own Exynos 7420 octa-core SoC, it appears that the mobile chipset making company may have lost one of its biggest partners in the smartphone industry. However, Qualcomm's Vice President of Marketing, Tim McDonough, stated to TrustedReviews:
"We don't win every handset design with every OEM and that's normal for us. If you take a big customer, we might have nine devices running in parallel. If they've got 10 and we've got nine because we've lost one, you still have a very deep relationship and you are still mutually invested in each other's success. If you miss the timing window for a particular handset or the timing window for a particular customer, or you take too long going from geography to geography rolling it out, that can be a make or break thing for them"
Even though Qualcomm might have lost one of the largest smartphone makers in the world, the company will still be thriving from the likes of Xiaomi and LG, who have had significant levels of success in 2014. Xiaomi has already been crowned the third largest smartphone maker in the world, possessing a market share of 12.5 percent for the 2014 period. During Q4 2014, Xiaomi was the largest smartphone maker in terms of device shipments, zipping past both Apple and Samsung.
The Chinese tech firm plans to replicate that success with the release of its Xiaomi Note Pro, and Xiaomi Note, with both devices running Qualcomm's chipsets. Side by side, LG has also had a good run, selling a total of 59.1 million units for the 2014 period, with a majority of units comprising of the company's G3 smartphone, which is also incorporated with Qualcomm's chip.
When talking about the future of the mobile chipset market to TrustedReviews, McDonough states:
"It's a competitive market and people have to choose their path – such as do they vertically integrate. Some people have done that in the past and it's had varying degrees of success depending on who has tried to do it, some people have succeeded, some people have failed."
The company is currently working on its Snapdragon 820 'system on a chip,' which features a processor that is being manufactured on the Taipan architecture, exceeding the company's Krait chips in both performance and energy efficiency.
