It was a decidedly brave move for Samsung to rely on its own Exynos processors to be used in their make-or-break flagship devices, but it has proven to be somewhat of a masterstroke given the chip’s quality and raw material cost saving’s for Samsung. On the other side of the coin, the real loser out of all of this is Qualcomm who has lost one of its biggest customers, and even if Samsung continues to use Qualcomm for some of its lower spec processor, that’s potentially 70 million devices out there in the world that won’t be using Qualcomm chips. As a result, Qualcomm may spin off its Snapdragon unit as a reaction to this, or even cut its patent royalties which Qualcomm gets for every device sold with Qualcomm hardware in it.
That might all seem pretty drastic, but you can get a feel for the scale of loss when you consider that Samsung has paid Qualcomm over 10 trillion won (approximately $9.2 billion USD) over the last 4 years starting with the Samsung Galaxy S. However,with the ever growing threat of MediaTek, and now Samsung as well, Qualcomm may have no choice but to split its chip manufacturing division from its licencing business if this keeps going south.
What do you think about Qualcomm splitting off its chip manufacturing division? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Source: Business Korea via Phone Arena
