China-based white box vendors will get an impressive impact on the smartphone market this year, since estimations say that they’ll ship 200 million smartphones this year. The info comes from industry sources in Taiwan and their advantage is the availability of cheap chip solutions.
Taiwanese company MediaTek will offer the makers its MT6575 chip solution, that will be available for use on entry level smartphones in Q1 2012. There’s also the MT6577 chipset for high level devices, that will be available in the third quarter of 2012. MediaTek will ship 50-70 million chips to the white box vendors mentioned above, for around 30% of the smartphones that will be shipped by the vendors in 2012. Qualcomm has also enhanced the promotion on the Chinese market and now offers turn key solutions to the vendors we mentioned plus prices as low as $6 for chips.
White box vendors from China will sell more than 60% of their smartphone output to overseas markets and these include area where 3G networks aren’t that popular and mature yet, sources say. We’re also expecting a larger market demand seeing that production costs will drop to $60, $85 and $130, according to the sources. We’ve tested some interesting devices from Allview, Eboda and Evolio, Eastern European companies that buy white box vendor devices and rebrand them, plus they add something extra to the price and still the result is affordable. Will they also revamp their lineup as the chip prices drop? We’ll see…
