Qualcomm urgently needs to prove to investors and the market that it makes money outside the mobile phone business and continues to grow profitability.
This year's ChinaJoy has become a gathering place for mobile phone manufacturers. The king is glory. If you don't take out PK, you are embarrassed to say that you have a flagship machine.
However, behind the rivals of mobile phone manufacturers, there is a big Boss hidden, that is Qualcomm. Whether it is Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, one plus, hammer, black shark mobile phone manufacturers are equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, especially high-end flagship machine The Snapdragon 845 mobile platform is almost standard.
The Qualcomm Xiaolong mobile platform has always promoted high performance and ultra-low power consumption, allowing users to believe that the smart phone can also achieve the gaming experience comparable to PC or game consoles. At the same time, it also indicates to mobile phone manufacturers: Mobile games need to play cool, Qualcomm Xiaolong know?
More interestingly, this is the first time Qualcomm has participated in ChinaJoy. Although PC games have gradually declined, the rise of mobile games has given it the determination to win this position. Qualcomm official even defined 2018 as the first year of game phones.
According to the data, in 2017, there are 2.1 billion players playing games and smartphones in the world, and the value of mobile games is as high as 108.9 billion US dollars, far exceeding PCs and game consoles. If you look at the geographical area, the Chinese market is even more It has created a value of 14.6 billion US dollars, and the investment in mobile games in the Asia-Pacific region is far more than the rest of the world.
Such market prospects have prompted mobile phone manufacturers to start working on the game level, which has given birth to the hotspot of game phones. This is also the market that Qualcomm is aiming at.
Qualcomm's bottom gas is derived from the game optimization of its products. Take the Snapdragon 845 mobile platform as an example. As the standard for the current Android high-end machine, compared with the previous generation, the Snapdragon 845's image and visual processing architecture is in video shooting. Power consumption is reduced by up to 30% in games and XR applications, and thanks to the Qualcomm Adreno 630 GPU, image performance and energy efficiency can be increased by up to 30%, Qualcomm? Kryo? 385 architecture can be used in games, application startup time and heavy load On the program, achieve up to 25% performance improvement.
However, Qualcomm is obviously not satisfied with eating only the cake, mobile games are not just mobile games. Now with the gradual popularization of AR, VR, and MR, game users are also beginning to shift, and Qualcomm refers to them as the next generation. Game platform: Xiaolong XR.
Qualcomm is trying to showcase 4K HD game screen output, immersive mobile XR experience, and other features of Snapdragon 845 by connecting a mobile phone with a USB Type-C connected TV to a top-of-the-line smartphone and XR terminal.
It can be seen that Qualcomm has begun to explore diversified revenue sources outside the mobile phone chip, trying to cover its own technology and chips to more application scenarios.
In fact, at the end of last year, Qualcomm has entered the unfamiliar PC industry with the Snapdragon 835 platform. Because Qualcomm sees that PC has reached a transitional moment, high endurance and connectivity have become two major pain points that need to be changed, and the connection is precisely The advantages of Qualcomm, the experience of mobile terminals can be directly extended to PC.
Now, Qualcomm's demand for diversified business is more urgent. On the one hand, the growth of smartphones in the global market is slowing down. On the other hand, it is due to the recent acquisition of Qualcomm's $44 billion acquisition of Dutch chipmaker NXP, due to the failure to obtain China. The approval of the regulatory body, the transaction failed.
The acquisition of NXP is an excellent opportunity for Qualcomm to occupy a leading supplier in the automotive market outside the mobile phone industry, as the demand for chips deployed annually is increasing with the development of smart driving.
However, this vision has not been realized, and it is expected that the expansion of Qualcomm's sales will come to an end with the help of NXP. Qualcomm urgently needs to prove to investors and the market that it makes money outside the mobile phone business and continues to grow profitability.
In a report on Reuters on Thursday, Qualcomm expects to sell more than $1 billion in semiconductor chips for smart watches and smart speakers in the current fiscal year, which is actually the layout of the Internet of Things.
Gartner had previously predicted that by 2020, the global IoT will have more than 20 billion smart devices connected, and the overall economic benefits will be as high as $11 trillion.
In the process, Qualcomm's advantage is to provide a portfolio of chips and platforms including mobile, multimedia, cellular, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth system-on-chip. In fact, Qualcomm's layout has begun to take shape, in a Qualcomm project. In a statement disclosed to analysts, the data shows that its chips are currently used in more than 200 so-called wearable devices, as well as 1,300 different wireless headsets, headphones and smart speakers, which are becoming more and more popular.
This layout is also in line with Qualcomm's vision for the future of 5G, providing services for all smart devices outside of mobile phones, providing chips and services in various fields and vertical industries.
Just different from the mobile phone industry, the Internet of Things in the 5G era is a new ecology and model. Compared with Qualcomm's dominance in mobile phone chips, its ambition is obviously greater.