| | | The MXL case is in Singapore Arbitration. Strangely, in the latest SEC filings it says the first face to face meeting about this case is October 2025 (??). Don't ask me why.
When you say the smartphone market is "heating up", can you give numbers (units sold last year, this year and forecast for next year) so that it's more clear what you're trying to say? Without the numbers, it's just hypebole. Every non-Apple cell phone sold is ONE potential SIMO chip sale. How many units you talking about?
In cell phones the connectivity technology is UFS. For UFS 2.1 and 3.0 and 3.1, Micron bought a controller from SIMO, packaged it with Micron DRAM and NAND, and sold it to cell phone makers as the memory module.
Since summer 2023 Micron has been selling it's own internally developed UFS 4.0 NAND flash controller. Thie means they won't buy UFS 4.0 flash controllers from SIMO. As the cell phone market moves from UFS 3.1 to 4.0, SIMO won't have Micron as a sales channel. It's likely a disaster for SIMO's cell phone controller business. Stay tuned. BTW - in addition to slowing cell phone controller sales, this problem (loss of Micron in UFS 4.0) also will depress cell phone controller gross margins. The only way SIMO convinces "low end" cell phone makers to continue to use SIMO's UFS 3.1 controller rather than one of the NAND maker's newer UFS 4.0 controller is through price reductions of UFS 3.1 controllers.
As for WDC and STX, I don't think they are in PC markets in any meaningful way. Instead they have very large disk drives that store data in data centers somewhere. It's still a big big market, but it's old tech, and not really involved with PCs (which are almost 100% SSD NAND flash memory and 0% disk drive). |
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