Keeping its focus to develop mobile computing ecosystems, Taiwan based MediaTek is a globally recognized fabless semiconductor company, and has emerged as a major force in cutting-edge systems on a chip for wireless communications, HDTV, DVD and Blu-ray.
MediaTek created the world’s first octa-core smartphone platform with LTE and its CorePilot technology released the full power of multi-core mobile processors. Most importantly, today, the company is powering some of the big mobile brands in India with its cost effective SoC. Finbarr Moynihan, General Manager – Business Development at MediaTek, spoke with TelecomDrive.com on the company’s priorities and its ongoing engagements in India.
How important is the Indian market for MediaTek?
India is an extremely important market for us. And this is because India has a number of manufacturers of mobiles and smartphones and this number is growing. And most importantly, this is one of the fastest growing markets today and there is huge potential for future growth here.
How many partners does MediaTek has in India?
As we are quite firmly entrenched in the market, MediaTek is working with almost all the Indian mobile manufacturers today.
How does the company engage with its customers? How much time does it take to bring new technology to market?
We are quite focused towards our engagement with customers. We have specific teams that work closely with the customers in terms of understanding their requirement and then create unique value propositions for them. We work with them on creating new feature sets, new multimedia capabilities etc.
Though it is difficult to put a timeline towards innovation, usually it takes about two months time for us to deliver to our customers.
What are some of the big priorities for MediaTek today?
At present we have three priorities. Firstly there is this transformation happening from 32 bit to 64 bit computing and we have a roadmap on this. We have a new quad-core, 64-bit SoC to follow up on our breakthrough octa-core, 32-bit product.
Secondly we are focusing towards supporting our customers in a better manner and thirdly and most importantly, we are focusing towards the wearable space.
What kind of trends do you see in this space of personalized computing?
It is going to be really exciting. Wearable computing holds great potential today. There are so many applications that can have a new meaning with wearables. Healthcare and fitness is just one example, Google Glass is another example, then you can have wearables on your clothes, it can all give a new meaning to the fashion industry as well. So there would be a lot of action in this space of personalized computing.
Is MediaTek working with Indian brands on wearable technology?
We cannot name any brands that we are working on at present, but wearable is surely a big focus area for us and we are working with Indian mobile manufacturers on this front.
How big is the company’s operations in India and what are your plans for growth?
We have a big research and development facility based in Noida, in the NCR region. We have about 100 people now and here we are engaged in research and development for our global customers and global markets, not just the Indian market.
