Qualcomm's dominance of TD's cold 4G chip or nothing

The global 3G smart phone has achieved great success, with behind-the-scenes heroes and Qualcomm, a US company with a monopoly of 3G chip supply.

There are now three kinds of 3G systems in the world, namely WCDMA, CDMA2000 and TD-SCDMA. The supply of the first two kinds of standard chips, Qualcomm is in an absolute monopoly position, relying solely on patent fees, it earns a lot of money - According to industry sources, each 3G mobile phone, Qualcomm will charge a dollar of patent fees.

However, the outstanding performance on WCDMA and CDMA2000 does not mean that Qualcomm is impeccable. In the world's largest mobile phone consumer and producer, Qualcomm has both current hardships and future developments.

As a foreign investment, Qualcomm happily "defends" TD -- Qualcomm has not only failed to produce eight hundred TD-SCDMA chips, but has never had TD chip development. Qualcomm is a world-renowned innovative high-tech company with strong scientific research capabilities. If it is determined, Qualcomm will not “stand by” in the development of TD chips.

In fact, TD development far exceeds Qualcomm's expectations. Under the leadership of China Mobile, TD-SCDMA has a good development trend, and users have come from behind, surpassing the number of users of the other two formats. As of the end of February this year, the number of TD users was 24,457,000. The number of CDMA2000 and WCDMA users was 14.76 million and 16.68 million.

Due to the huge number of mobile subscriber bases in China, as the TD industry chain continues to mature, the number of TD subscribers has grown significantly faster than the other two 3G standards. The Secretary-General of the TD Industry Alliance, Yang Hao, said that TD users are expected to exceed 50 million in 2011.

The good development trend of the TD industry has given Qualcomm a false sense of the situation. Such mistakes can be imagined to the economic losses caused by Qualcomm. At present, TD users account for 43.7% of the total number of 3G users, which means that from the very beginning, Qualcomm lost almost half of the country. In spite of Gaotong's fate and the use of "hanging sheep's heads and selling dog's meat" to produce TD chips through other chip companies, these efforts cannot change the fact that Qualcomm missed the TD opportunity and was indifferent to TD development.

Of course, the damage that Qualcomm missed due to TD opportunities did not end here, but cast a shadow over its future development. Qualcomm may never have thought that TD-LTE can achieve positive results and become the fourth-generation international standard for mobile communications technology. Some TD chip manufacturers in China have long been planning to use TD-LTE-based 4G chips. The fastest TD-LTE chips will be available early this year and early next year. However, on the TD-LTE chip R&D, Qualcomm still has no choice. As the CDMA2000 standard that has been playing the leading role in the US market has not been able to become a 4G standard, Qualcomm not only lags behind in the development of TD-LTE chips, but Qualcomm is losing its status as a “leader” in the development of the entire 4G chip.

If we say that TD is the starting point for China Communications to go global and Qualcomm has lost only one Chinese market, it is just a tree. Then, if TD-LTE is missed, Qualcomm will miss an entire forest. The Chinese government and China Mobile are Determined to successfully bring TD-LTE to the international market: Now other countries and regions have expressed strong interest in TD-LTE. For Qualcomm, this is both a test and a torment - this is exactly the same situation as the current communications giant Nokia describes itself as being on a burning sea platform, but Nokia has already realized that Qualcomm did not realize it. already.