MediaTek continues to be the top supplier of this key smartphone component

If I were to ask you to name the company that had the largest share of the smartphone application processor (AP) market worldwide during the first quarter, you might say Apple. After all, every Apple iPhone has an Apple-designed application processor. In the case of the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus, it is the A15 Bionic SoC that drives those models while the A16 Bionic powers the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max. Did you guess Apple? If you did, you're wrong.

So you then might move along to Qualcomm and that would seem to be the winning name. After all, Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipsets are found under the hood of many an Android phone. So if Apple doesn't have the largest first-quarter global market share in smartphone APs, it has to be Qualcomm. Right? Wrong.

Actually, the winning name is MediaTek. According to Counterpoint Research (via GizmoChina), the Taiwan-based "fabless" chip designer had a 32% market share in the global smartphone application processor industry during Q1 2023. Even though MediaTek has been the leading AP provider for handsets over at least the last six quarters, its share has declined over the last three. During the same quarter last year, MediaTek owned a leading 36% share of the market.

MediaTek's 11% year-over-year decline in market share was blamed on inventory adjustments and weak demand and this could also carry over to the current quarter (Q2) which is forecast to show a larger than 5% decline in LTE SoC shipments for MediaTek with a smaller than 5% increase in 5G SoC shipments.

Qualcomm was second with a 28% slice of the global smartphone AP pie during the first three months of the year. It was a nice rebound for the company since during the previous quarter it finished third with 19% of the market and trailed Apple. During the first quarter, Apple dropped back to third with a 26% share followed by UNISOC with 8% and Samsung with 4%.

MediaTek's current top-of-the-line smartphone chipset is the recently released Dimensity 9200+ which was just unveiled last month. The AP features one prime Cortex-X3 CPU core running at a clock speed of up to 3.35GHz, three Cortex-A715 performance CPU cores running at a speed of up to 3.0GHz, and four Cortex-A510 efficiency CPU cores running at a clock speed of 2.0GHz. It's main competition is the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset from Qualcomm.