The current market on the global smartphone shipments in 2023 is generally not very optimistic, according to many market research organizations published data forecasts show that sales from only 0.9% growth of 1.202 billion units to a decline of 7%, the total shipments of 1.1 billion units have. The premise of this data still depends on the economic recovery in Europe and the U.S., as well as the economic effects of China's reopening of its borders. In our opinion, given the current global climate, it will take a lot of effort to keep global smartphone shipments flat in 2023. Looking at the revenue performance of the world's two largest mobile chipset vendors, Qualcomm and MediaTek, both companies experienced annual revenue declines in the fourth quarter of 2022, which continued into the first quarter of 2023, although MediaTek's decline was significantly larger than Qualcomm's, as shown in Figure 1. The reason for this is that the inventory level of major handset manufacturers is too high, and their ability to pull goods from the chip industry has declined. In addition, the market share of MediaTek's handset processors in recent years has been significantly higher than that of Qualcomm's, and MediaTek has suffered a more pronounced impact as a result of the one-two punch.

Figure 1. Revenue Growth Rate Change of Qualcomm and MediaTek

Source：Qualcomm & MediaTek Financial Reports; Collated by Ji-Pu Industrial Trend Research Institute