WHAT IS MEDIATEK?
MediaTek Inc. is a Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company that provides chips for wireless communications, high-definition television, handheld mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers, navigation systems, consumer multimedia products and digital subscriber line services as well as optical disc drives.
Headquartered in Hsinchu, the company has 25 offices worldwide and was the third largest fabless IC designer worldwide in 2016. MediaTek was founded in 1997. The company also provides its customers with reference designs.
WHEN HAS IT EMERGED?
MediaTek was originally a unit of the Taiwanese firm, United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), tasked with designing chipsets for home entertainment products. On May 28, 1997, the unit was spun off and incorporated. MediaTek Inc. was listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSEC) under the "2454" code on July 23, 2001. The company started out designing chipsets for optical drives and subsequently expanded into chips for DVD players, digital TVs, mobile phones, smartphones and tablets. In general MediaTek has had a strong record of gaining market share and displacing competitors after entering new markets.
The company launched a division to design products for mobile devices in 2004. Seven years later, it was taking orders for more than 500 million mobile system-on-chip units per annum, which included products for both feature phones and smart devices. By providing extensive system engineering assistance the company allowed many smaller companies and new entrants to enter a mobile phone market that had previously been dominated by large, often vertically integrated corporations that had long been broadly entrenched in the telecommunications industry. The mobile chip market quickly became the main growth driver for the company.
On September 10, 2007, MediaTek announced its intention to buy Analog Devices cellular radio and baseband chipset divisions for US$350 million. The acquisition was finalized by January 11, 2008.
On May 5, 2011, MediaTek acquired Ralink Technology Corporation, gaining products and expertise for Wi-Fi technology for mobile and non-mobile applications, as well as for wired DSL and Ethernet connectivity
On April 11, 2012, MediaTek acquired Coresonic, a global producer of digital signal processing products based in Linköping, Sweden. Coresonic became a wholly owned subsidiary of MediaTek in Europe. On June 22, 2012, MediaTek announced it would acquire rival Taiwanese chipset designer MStar Semiconductor Inc., which held a strong market share position in digital television chips.
The following merger between MediaTek and MStar was delayed by antitrust concerns in China and South Korea and finalized on February 1, 2014. At Mobile World Congress 2014, MediaTek unveiled its new brand "Everyday Genius", dubbing the term "Super-mid-market", with the vision and aiming to make smartphones more accessible affordable to the wider market. As of November 2014, over 1500 mobile models accounting for 700 million units were shipped globally in 2014, using MediaTek chips, and the company posted revenues of US$5.3 billion in the first half of 2014, nearly as much as the whole of 2013. The revenue growth was however partly due to revenue recognition from the acquisition of MStar which became effective at the beginning of 2014.
On September 7, 2015, MediaTek announced to buy Richtek Technology Corp., a fabless vendor of analog ICs and power management ICs based in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Richtek became a wholly subsidiary of MediaTek after completion of the acquisition in the second quarter of 2016. In September 2019, MediaTek collaborated with VVDN Technologies to design, manufacture new-age AIoT solutions. On November 25, 2019, MediaTek and Intel announced a partnership to bring 5G to PCs in 2021.
MediaTek overtook Qualcomm as the largest vendor of smartphone chipsets in the world in the third quarter of 2020, mainly due to significant growth in the Indian and Latin American markets.
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