Comments on: HTC planning own phone chips: Where’s the sense?

By: tinotino

tinotino — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:25:58 +0000

About f-ing time.

They probably want to do low end chip first and build up the expertise to eventually catch up to Snapdragon S series of chips.

It took Huawei a lot to get here and so far none of the non-Qualcomm manufacturer has come up with a LTE solution. No even Samsung.

By: keninca

keninca — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:21:13 +0000

I don’t know if it’s such a bad idea. Other than Samsung, the mobile SoC vendors are all fabless, and have at least 50% gross margins, implying that a company with enough volume might be able to save 40% or so. If they’re paying $20 for a SoC now, and can buy it from TSMC (disclosure: I own shares of TSMC) for $12, and can sell 20M of those phones a tear, investing $100M in developing their own chip would be paid off in less than a year, and allow them to either sell the phone for $15 less, or make more profit on each one. And I don’t think it would cost them $100M to develop a SoC, there is a lot of proven IP they can license.

By: Kevin C. Tofel

Kevin C. Tofel — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:31:24 +0000

Great point, Jeremy. If true, I wonder if Qualcomm would call their bluff and simply say, “Go for it alone, we’re not changing prices.” Hmmm…..

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:55:25 +0000

I would be surprised if they actually did this. Most likely, they are just trying to negotiate better pricing out of QCOM and are using this as a public marketing stunt. If I recall correctly, Samsung used to do the same thing in the past.