In the current international trade environment, the first-line domestic mobile phones are not willing to put all their lives on Qualcomm.

Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “the world of magic iron” (ID: jiangpeiyu0916).

Basic focus

1. The global first-line mobile phone brand is not conducive to the differentiation of Qualcomm mobile phones. The fourth and fifth places have the risk of falling behind. The sum of the two shares is not as good as the second or first place, and the entire Qualcomm mobile phone. Both show signs of contraction.

2. Under the current international trade environment, the first-line domestic mobile phones are not willing to put all their lives on Qualcomm, and need to open up the second source of goods to reduce business risks.

The once inspirational Samsung seems to be a joke now.

After struggling for many years on the road of self-developed CPUs, Samsung recently passed out the self-developed CPU core Mongoose, which disbanded the 300-person R&D team in Austin, Texas. Some media reports said that Samsung has invested a total of 17 billion US dollars for self-developed CPU cores, totaling more than 110 billion yuan. Now it seems that all tuition fees have been paid.

Strong Samsung madly burns 100 billion yuan, give up self-developed CPU, why is the most anxious is Qualcomm?

However, if you take a break, you will find that Samsung is not a real loser. There is another person who is anxious.

The mobile phone chip market is brewing a big change.

Samsung’s $100 million tuition value is not worth it?

Speaking of it, Samsung is also a veteran player on the self-developed chip table. The first generation iPhone 12 years ago used Samsung’s S5L8900 chip. At that time, Samsung’s focus was on the self-developed SOC chip, which is the kernel integrated design. The CPU and other cores were purchased from third-party IP. In 2015, the CPU core self-study program was started, which was three years later than Apple.

In the mobile phone chip market that is updated every year, 3 years is equivalent to 3 generations. This seems to be the performance of Apple’s self-developed CPU. The fundamental reason why Samsung has paid 100 billion tuition fees has to be recognized.

This view clearly underestimates the threshold for CPU core development.

The CPU core circuit design is complicated, especially when the number of transistors is hundreds of millions of clocks. The CPU core has been developed from 0, and the threshold has become quite high. EnglishAfter more than two decades, Intel and ARM have gradually surrendered the mature and usable architecture after paying no mathematics fees.

So, why is Apple’s self-developed CPU core improving? You know, from A4 to A6, only three generations have been added. On the one hand, Apple has recruited top design talents, on the other hand, it has also copied some shortcuts.

In early 2014, the Alumni Research Foundation of the University of Wisconsin-Madison filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that Apple’s CPUs based on the A7, A8, and A8X chips infringed its patents for “parallel processing of computer data speculation circuits.” This patented technology can improve the performance and overall performance of the CPU, and its position in the field of computer CPU architecture is extremely important.

In 2015, Apple’s A9 chip was also accused by the Foundation of CPU infringement.

The court ruled that the foundation won the case and Apple still lost the appeal.

So, for Samsung, it’s hard to get back before the high threshold of the CPU core.

However, Samsung changed the track and returned to the ARM public version of the CPU, and there is a more profitable factor than the self-developed CPU. This will also be the reason for Qualcomm to turn the opposite side, namely OPPO, vivo and Xiaomi. Brand differentiation pressure.

Qualcomm mobile phone differentiation pressure

There was an unusual change in the mobile phone market in the first three quarters of this year, which is the differential pressure on Qualcomm phones.

In the Qualcomm mobile phone, in addition to the advantages of the Samsung mobile phone in the whole industry chain, there are certain differences in selling points. Others such as the first line of millet, OPPO, vivo, second and third line Meizu, Lenovo and Nubia are all homogeneous. The trend, the difference in appearance and function selling point is not obvious. Everyone grabs the chip and the camera starts, and the game is still in the past, and finally falls into the price war.

The result is that Qualcomm’s flagship chip Snapdragon 855Plus spans the price of 2600+ to 6000+, but the running model is concentrated below 5000, making Qualcomm mobile phones face huge profit pressure.

Moreover, since the main battlefield of most Qualcomm mobile phones is in the Chinese market, there is a new situation in the Chinese market this year. That is, Huawei started from the second quarter, due to the unfavorable factors of the international environment, the main battlefield will be from Europe and Two of China have reduced to a market in China.

As a result, in the third quarter of this year, Huawei’s domestic market share in China has exceeded 42%, while shipments of vivo, Oppo and millet have plummeted by 20%-30%, down by 4-5 million units. .

Strong Samsung madly burns 100 billion yuan, give up self-developed CPU, why is the most anxious is Qualcomm?