According to the reports Oppo is working on its own chipset and hired top executives from Mediatek and Soc. Oppo is long-rumored to be working on an in house chip to compete against the big chipset manufacturers like Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung’s Exynos, and Huawei’s Kirin.
Why Oppo is making its own Chipset?
Oppo is China’s second-largest smartphone maker and fifth in the world, pushing deliberately to design its own mobile chips. Last year, when the U.S. started banning flagship Chinese tech companies like Huawei. Oppo’s campaign aimed to reduce the company’s dependency on US-based suppliers. The company’s efforts to come up with its own chipset is part of a larger “de-Americanization”.
According to Nikkei Asian Review, Oppo has hired MediaTek’s former co-chief operating officer Jeffery Ju and a former Xiaomi executive recently and in a couple of months, another executive working on MediaTek’s 5G chips is said to join Oppo soon. In addition, Oppo is keenly looking to hire senior executives from Qualcomm and Huawei also.
“Oppo has been aggressively recruiting chip talent since last year as they realized that owning the chip design capability will give it more control over its supply chain,” a source told Nikkei. “Developing chips, however, could mean burning a lot of money, and even if they have hired a group of experienced professionals, such efforts take years to mature.”
In response, Oppo told Nikkei that it “already has the chip-related capability” and that “any R&D investment is to strengthen its product competitiveness and user experience”.
As you might be aware already, Oppo currently sources its chipsets from Qualcomm and MediaTek. Making its own chipset will also help Oppo to lower down its Smartphone prices and earn more. Might be Oppo’s chipset will not end up like Xiaomi’s Surge S1 or it would help Oppo to establish itself as a potential chipset maker.
