A report from Strategy Analytics shows that Qualcomm continues to lead the market for application processors used in smartphone manufacturing, although its market share has fallen. Not only did Qualcomm lead Q1 2012 in terms of unit shipments, it also took 44% of revenue share.
Overall, the global smartphone application processor market showed 55% year-on-year growth in the first quarter of 2012, reaching $2.47 billion (£1.58 billion).
The top five companies were Qualcomm, Samsung, Texas Instruments, Broadcom and MediaTek. MediaTek appeared in the top five ranking for the first time, while Marvell dropped out of the top five rankings this quarter.
Around 30% of all smartphone applications processors were multi-core chips; this increasing adoption of multi-core processors saw stand-alone applications processors gaining share to account for 44% of total smartphone applications processors shipped in Q1 2012.
Stuart Robinson, Director of the Strategy Analytics Handset Component Technologies service, said “Despite its strong momentum in the tablet applications processor market, NVIDIA’s smartphone applications processor market share continues to be a concern. Strategy Analytics estimates that NVIDIA’s smartphone applications processor revenue share has been stagnant at 2% from Q1 2011. We believe NVIDIA continues to miss the large addressable market as it currently lacks baseband-integrated applications processors.”