The LTE Baseband Market: Qualcomm as the LTE baseband supplier of choice for the majority of device vendors

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The chipset market is increasingly open. New entrants are committed to challenge traditional suppliers like Qualcomm, MediaTek or Spreadtrum.

Among powerful emerging suppliers, we have Huawei and Samsung, which increasingly deploy their own LTE chips for powering own flagship devices.
 
Overall, in its latest quarterly IC market tracker, ABI Research finds Qualcomm remains the indisputable leader in LTE basebands with the 65% market share the company scored in 2015.

Qualcomm has strong LTE product portfolio and roadmap, which enables clients to bring high-throughput and advanced access features to their devices at competitive price points.

According to ABI Research, LTE baseband shipments grew 22% quarter-on-quarter in the fourth quarter of 2015, reaching more than 323 million units. Samsung lagged behind Qualcomm (65%) second, holding 12% market share. Huawei’s HiSilicon and MediaTek disputed the third place with 9% market share each. 

Player like MediaTek, who is relatively new entrant to the LTE space is lagging behind in terms of supporting LTE Carrier Aggregation (CA) technology. In theory, this technology enables operators to offer higher mobile access speeds exceeding 100Mbps.

According to ABI Research, MediaTek only managed to ship less than 6 million LTE CA chips in the fourth quarter of 2015, holding a tiny market share of 3.5% in this segment. During the same period and within this particular market segment, Qualcomm still held the greatest market share at 59%. Samsung followed with 21% and Huawei’s HiSilicon trailed behind that with 14% market share.