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China's Allwinner Outsold Intel, Qualcomm In Tablet Processors In 2012
An anonymous reader writes "ARM licensee Allwinner sold more application processors for tablet computers in 2012 than Intel and Qualcomm put together, according to this EE Times article that references market researcher Strategy Analytics. Overall one in five tablet processors was provided by a Chinese vendor in 2012, according to the article, partly because they sell chips at half the price of similarly specified chips from better known vendors."
Samsung is manufacturing those in Texas. Technically that is in the US although the residents there seem to think differently.
As of August 2012,[18] the A5 is manufactured at Samsung's Austin, Texas factory. Samsung invested $3.6 billion in a facility in Austin to produce chips such as processors, and nearly all of that wing's output is dedicated to Apple components.[19] Samsung has invested a further $4.2 billion at the Austin facility in order to transition to a 28 nm fabrication process by the second half of 2013
Undercutting competition is pretty much the definition of the hallowed free market. He who can sustain the loss the longest wins, that shouldn't surprise anyone.
... whatever
These are cheap for a reason, and they're unpopular in the rest of the world for a reason.
The Allwinner chips used in these tablets are all ARM Cortex-A8 based. A Cortex-A8 is basically unfit for a tablet. The lowest end tablets sold by Apple, Samsung, Motorola, Sony, Acer, and Asus 4 years ago didn't have a CPU this slow. Just because they can get away with selling these in China doesn't mean that they are worth anything.
Allwinner sold more tabletprocessors than Intel and Qualcomm. The report they cite is that Qualcomm is in the top 5 smartphone and tablet processors. As far as I know Qualcomm doesn't do a lot of business in the tablet market because most of their chips are in smartphones. As for Intel, they haven't sold many tablets to date as x86 tablets are not that common. Apple and Samsung are in both smartphone and tablet markets so they should be represented. Am I the only one that thinks this isn't as shocking as it seems?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Basically, they are selling at or below cost to suck up market share.
no, they're not. they're a profit-maximising company, just like any other profit-maximising company. if they did what you're accusing them of doing, they'd go bankrupt.
what we believe they have done is just said, "right: we're going to aim BIG". rather than be scared shitless of the NREs for processor development, they simply decided that they would aim for an extremely large number of processors, and either got a PRC Govt Grant or just got very very good investors. they would then have negotiated an EXTREMELY good rate with one of the fabs, based on the projected volume, and that alone would allow them to sell at the price that they set out to sell at. especially if they placed a cash order for a vast number of chips.
so it's simple economics and sound business sense that has allowed them to sell a 1ghz processor at $7.50 when all *PREVIOUS* competition *INCLUDING COMPETITORS IN CHINA* were selling at around $11 or even $13 for a product that had less features.
the other thing that has allowed them to take the world by storm in this area is the extremely high level of integration in their SoC, as well as working with (i believe they actually own) X-Powers to create an exceptionally low-cost and highly optimised Power Management IC, called the AXP209. the cost of this PMIC is $1.50 in volume.
basically you can get away with $30 worth of parts to do a seriously good little board, which has 1gb of RAM, 4gb of NAND Flash, ethernet, SATA, USB2 and HDMI and more, when everyone else is struggling to hit $35 to $38. that's a big, big difference in this kind of market, and it explains why, when the Allwinner A10 was introduced, that a major recession occurred INSIDE CHINA, in the Electronics District of Guangdong, Shenzen.
i'll say that again, in case you didn't understand. whilst you are accusing China (the country) of "price dumping in the USA", *one very ambitious young company* managed to cause a MAJOR RECESSION IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY.
why is that? it's because the electronics industry in china is critically dependent on and focussed on volume sales. the Allwinner A10 and its associated PMIC and high level of integration left many factories holding out-of-date stock. companies that did NOT move over to the A10 in time were left with stock that they couldn't shift. if they did shift - reneging on contracts in the process, in many cases - they left the SUPPLIERS holding the stock, and i don't know if you're aware of this but China basically operates on a cash-only, cash-up-front basis.
the shift caused by the introduction of the A10 was so vast, and so quick, that it basically wiped out any company that didn't change over in time. including the ODM company that we were talking to at the time, whose clients (factories) all had invested in AMLogic's $13 processor at the time.
so - please do be better informed before making assumptions and accusations such as those which you are making, ok? the country you live in is a very small market compared to china. america is not even particularly relevant, here, because americans expects bigger, better and much much faster than a 1ghz single-core low-power ARM processor. please take more care, ok?