1. I am aware of the Samsung activity in Shanghai because they (Samsung) have "mentioned" it in their website. What I have not seen is any indication of the committed dollar volume of the award. Also I have noticed that there is not a lot of mention of this activity in the trade press, which would accompany a significant "committed" award such as $100 - $200 million etc.
My questioning revolves around the fact that China has historically been the province of two major suppliers: MOT and LME. These two have historically had greater than 85 percent of all cellular infrastructure activity in China, and Shanghai has historically been MOT "bread and butter" territory. LME I think is presently not positioned well in CDMA due to prior TDMA R&D commitments, so I would assume that MOT will be a major player going forward in Shanghai business for CDMA.
In this milieu, MOT has a lot of advantages that Samsung and others do not, including many years of sales history to the major buyers, as well as having completely digitally "mapped" the detailed RF parameters of the Shanghai area. This is a huge undertaking and without it, a supplier could never safely guarantee the operation of the network. I would be shocked if MOT were totally "boxed out" of the CDMA PCS business for Shanghai by Samsung.
My question is because sometimes, a supplier will agree to supply a skeletal system, maybe for a field trial, at little or no cost, for the benefit of announcing that they have been "selected" as the supplier. This happens all the time. So my question is, what is the actual committed scope of the project.
In addition, I have some doubts because in China, unlike some other places, the same people offer PCS as offer cellular. This is for the most part MPT and Liang Tong/Unicom (second carrier). There has been tremendous cellular infrastructure activity in Shanghai area over the last two years, and I have my doubts that these entities will significantly cannibalize their huge cellular investments by making a major effort to offer PCS (they would basically be competing against themselves).
A few other notes: typically the telecom authorities in the various cities and provinces jealously guard their turf, especially in cellular business. Activity in Shanghai area tends to have no bearing on what happens in geographically neighboring cities (in the case of Shanghai, this would include Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, etc.). So even if someone gets an award for Shanghai, this only tends to relate to Shanghai environs, which maybe includes about 20 - 30 million people, of whom only a small number are potential subscribers.
2. RFMD seems to mainly intend to be a merchant supplier in gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductor devices for wireless handsets, with a focus on the above 1 GHz range (=PCS). They don't seem to be involved much in the infrastructure device business. It's hard for me to comment on this area, because I don't know the market as well as infrastructure. I would assume that they seek to be a merchant supplier to those companies who will develop handsets without developing their own internally manufactured chipsets. Usually the major handset suppliers such as MOT and LME build their own chipsets due to economies of scale, while second tier handset suppliers may buy out the chipsets from merchant suppliers. |
