A source speaking to the EE Times has revealed plans by Lenovo to get into the mobile processor design market. The move may have something to do with Samsung’s refusal to supply its latest range of Exynos processors to the huge Chinese PC and smart device maker. However it may also be a strategy devised before that event, as more and more large consumer electronics companies have sought to vertically integrate their businesses.
There aren’t a lot of details about Lenovo’s plans to start making its own mobile processors. The main clue to the company’s intentions has come from its recruitment activities. Lenovo currently has a 10-strong team who work on its own specially designed integrated circuits and other such R&D projects. The company is seeking to add a further 100 engineers to this team (40 engineers in the Shenzhen area and 60 in Beijing) by midsummer.
Other companies who make mobile gadgets and have their own chip-making division include Samsung, Huawei and Apple. These companies enjoy the utmost control over their smartphone processors and, with scale, are able to reduce/control costs. Until now Lenovo enjoyed picking and choosing and possibly playing one chip supplier off another.
Lenovo is famously one of the bigger names to have made smartphones with an Intel mobile processor; perhaps its butterfly like behaviour helped it get an especially good deal from Chipzilla. However its recent attempts to secure a supply of Samsung Exynos processors hasn’t worked out; the pair couldn’t come to an amicable agreement.
The EE Times points out that Lenovo’s growing share of the Chinese smartphone market now puts it in second place with 13.2 per cent of sales (latest figures from Strategy Analytics 2012). Samsung leads with a 17.7 per cent share and Apple is third place with 11 per cent of the Chinese market.
Other indications of Lenovo’s ambitions can be seen from its recent high-level hires. Lenovo has hired ARM founder Tudor Brown as a non-executive director and also co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo, Jerry Yang, as a board observer.
