Baek Byung-yeul is a journalist at The Korea Times focused on cultural content, including films and cultural events in South Korea. You can contact him at baekby@koreatimes.co.kr to share your insights.
Samsung woos Chinese phone makers, seeking to expand AP biz
By Baek Byung-yeul
By Baek Byung-yeul
Samsung Electronics is trying to woo Chinese smartphone makers Vivo, Oppo and Xiaomi with its mobile application processor, in a significant step to find a breakthrough in the Chinese market where the company has lost ground.
The Korean tech giant recently announced on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, that it will introduce its Exynos 1080 application processor (AP) for mobile devices in Shanghai, Nov. 12.
Known to use the 5-nanometer process for lower power consumption and better performance, the Exynos 1080 is Samsung's latest AP for 5G network-supported smartphones. The chip is also expected to be used in Vivo's new smartphone.
As strong rival Huawei Technologies is forecast to reduce smartphone production next year because of Washington's strict sanctions, Samsung's plan to unveil the Exynos chip in China seems well-timed, as the Korean company can improve its presence by supplying AP chips to Chinese partners.
The AP chip is a key smartphone component handling many processes, from performing numerous calculations a second to graphics processing. Although Samsung sells the most smartphones in the world, the company remains behind AP chip design firms in the U.S. and Taiwan.
According to market tracker Counterpoint Research, Samsung shared fourth place with Apple in the mobile AP market in the second quarter with a 13 percent market share. Qualcomm led with 29 percent, Taiwan's MediaTek was second with 26 percent and China's HiSilicon was third with 16 percent.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, overall smartphone sales could be reduced this year compared with last year. But industry officials said the smartphone AP market will be on a sharp growth trend next year as adoption of the 5G network is expected to soar.
Vivo, Oppo and Xiaomi are expected to produce more mid-priced smartphones next year to fill the void left by Huawei, giving Samsung an opportunity to improve its AP chip share.
In regard to Samsung's announced unveiling of its latest mobile processor in China, an industry insider said the move could be interpreted as the company embarking on a project to attract Chinese manufacturers.
“The Samsung Exynos 1080 will be released in Shanghai, China, on Nov. 12. This is the first time Samsung has held a conference for the processor, which means that Samsung has begun to pay attention,” Ice universe, a renowned industry insider who shares information on upcoming smart devices, wrote on Twitter.
While Samsung has lost ground in the Chinese smartphone market, maintaining a market share of less than 1 percent for the past few years, the Korean tech company has strengthened its partnership with Chinese phone makers, providing core components as part of efforts to find an alternative way of doing business in China.
In 2019, Samsung started providing its Exynos 980, a predecessor of the Exynos 1080, for Vivo's X30 smartphone. The company also is expanding its partnership with Xiaomi, providing its Exynos 990 chips for its Mi 10E smartphone. Samsung also has been collaborating with Xiaomi, supplying image sensor chips for smartphone cameras.
Samsung's AP chips have been criticized for less performance than Qualcomm chips. To solve this issue, the Korean tech company gave up its strategy of developing its own mobile AP and decided to strengthen its partnership with Arm and AMD, which design central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs).
Pan Xuobao, director of the Samsung Semiconductor China Research Institute, said in a recent review that the Exynos 1080 will be able to display much improved performance compared to Qualcomm's Snapdragon 865 chip.