Samsung sources processors for its Galaxy smartphones and tablets from various brands, including Qualcomm, MediaTek, and its own semiconductor design arm. In 2020, the South Korean firm increased its chipset orders from Taiwanese firm MediaTek, helping it become the world's biggest smartphone chipset vendor for the first time.
According to a new report from Omdia, MediaTek topped Qualcomm for the first time to become the world's biggest smartphone chipset vendor. Its shipments reached 351.8 million units in 2020, which is a 47.8% growth compared to 2019 when it shipped 238 million smartphone processors. Among all its clients, Samsung showed the highest growth in terms of chipset orders compared to 2019. In 2020, MediaTek supplied 43.3 million smartphone processors to Samsung, which is a whopping 254.5% year-on-year growth.
Xiaomi was MediaTek's biggest client last year, with a purchase of 63.7 million processors. OPPO was MediaTek's second-biggest client and purchased 55.3 million chips (83.19 million if sub-brand Realme is included) from the Taiwanese company. Even since a trade ban was placed on Huawei, Honor and Huawei both started using MediaTek chips in a lot of products.
Samsung's semiconductor design business is also trying to lure more clients for its Exynos processors. Last year, the company supplied Exynos 980 and Exynos 880 chipsets to Vivo. This year, the company supplied the Exynos 1080 processor for Vivo's X60 series in China. It is being rumored that Samsung is also in talks with Xiaomi and OPPO, but no Exynos-powered phones from those brands have been released yet.
