Media Tek Buys ADI

iPhone sold 1 million within 6 days, it is a business miracle in the world. But there is another miracle maker in China in the mobile phone industry. That is Media Tech.

Media Tek Inc was founded in 1997, and it started to sell the cell phone chips to mainland China from 2004. Now, Media Tek covers the largest market share of cell phone chips in mainland China: 40%.

The Chinese maker of cell phone started to boom from 2002, and fell down in 2004. The reason is complicated, but one of the reasons is lack of technology support, especially the chips. Media Tek came in the right time. With Media Tek’s chips, the cell phone maker could launch a new model within very short time and low technology. So the Chinese cell phone maker began to recover with the help of Media Tek. Until now, only one Chinese cell phone maker doesn’t buy chips from Media Tek.

But there is a side effect. Since Media Tek made the cell phone development so easy, a lot of manufacturers began to make cell phone with the government’s certificate. They are called “black cell phone” in China. Now, a cell phone with windows CE, camera and GPS is sold about 200 US Dollars in China!!

It was just released that Media Tek bought Othello and Softfone from ADI, and got all the main technology of TD-SCDMA. What will happen in the 3G time? Media Tek no doubt will be an important player.