January 11, 2010

IDC Projects High Growth for Cell Broadband Chips

Market intelligence firm IDC expects worldwide cellular broadband chipset shipments to grow 35 percent year-over-year through 2014.

Cellular chipsets are the semiconductor engines that enable mobile phones to connect to each other; consequently, the growth in mobile phones to more than 1.1 billion in 2009 has provided an equally stunning rise in the cellular chipset market.

Increasingly, a greater percentage of cellular chipsets are being used in non-mobile phone applications, such as mobile computing, industrial/machine-to-machine (M2M), automotive, health/medical and consumer devices. While the portion of worldwide cellular chipsets used for these applications is currently small compared with the more than one billion unit mobile phone market, IDC forecasts significant growth in these cellular broadband applications through 2014.

“Cellular broadband chipsets can provide the all-important data connectivity to other devices, especially to the Internet, that consumers are increasingly demanding as they migrate from fixed/wired devices to mobile/handheld devices,” Flint Pulskamp, wireless semiconductor analyst at IDC, said in a statement.

The appeal for real-time data connectivity is strong for traditional devices, such as notebooks, but also for emerging medical, industrial and new consumer categories such as eReaders, Pulskamp stated.

According to IDC, worldwide cellular chipsets will grow at a 9.3 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) on a unit basis from 2009 to 2014. Cellular broadband applications made up less than 7 percent of this unit volume in 2009, but this market will grow at a 35 percent CAGR to account for over 16 percent of total chipsets by 2013, far outpacing the growth in the mobile phone market.

For more on the IDC's report, “Worldwide Cellular Broadband Chipset 2009-2014 Forecast and Analysis,” click here. For more on mobility from CT, click here.