Taiwanese MediaTek is bullish on the growth prospects in the Indian market and said that its business in the country is a reflection of revenue growth worldwide. In an interaction with The PageOne Asia, MediaTek India's managing director Anku Jain talks on global supply chain issues, flagship Dimensity 9000 chipset, R&D, and IoT focus as well as OEM partners such as Oppo, Vivo, Oneplus and Xiaomi. Edited excerpts

How are you looking at 5G trends, given the fact that commercial rollouts are just around the corner in India?

We already see the excitement in terms of 5G penetration, Going forward, I think people usually be able to really change the last few years, people want to rely more on connectivity, which is kind of a use case, which will further help in penetration 5G. So, we see a very good use case for it to get.

What is the percentage of MediaTek-powered 5G devices versus the rest of the phones including feature phones?

We do have a very good percentage of it right now already in the show. If you see MediaTek, we are you know, smartphones are just going vertical, right, and that is one of the biggest verticals that we have smartphone chips, but apart from that, we also have smart TVs and connectivity, IoT modules, and Wi-Fi and so on. So, you know, all the competencies are required for IoT. So, IoT itself is a very important vertical, in fact, today.

What are the sectors you are looking at for your IoT portfolio?

IoT could be a simple use case like smart meters, electricity meter, or water meter or it could be smart lighting or smart homes. As an industrial use case, we have all kinds of technology segments available to enable the service.

The Dimensity 9000 is one of your flagship products. How is the traction so far?

Our main motto is to democratize connectivity. So, for 5G, for Dimensity IV series of phones, we have mainstream to the premium, and all the flagship phones. In fact, we already saw launches of phones based on Dimensity 9000 chipset.

How many Indian device vendors currently work?

For Dimensity 9000 we have nearly Oppo, Vivo, Oneplus and Xiaomi globally. Specifically for myriad Dimensity 9000, in India, we will become the first OEM partner to launch a smartphone on the flagship chipset 9000 but this is not part of a global partnership.

How is your India business growing?

So, Indian business is growing very rapidly. We don't have specific numbers. But it is kind of a reflection of our global increase in sales because India is among the very broad market for MediaTek. It's a very high growth market for us. So India's numbers also going strong.

If we talk about Qualcomm and other competitors, where MediaTek is placed right now? What are your plans to further grow your market?

The last one to two years have been amazing for us as we have doubled the revenue. Also, we have become the number one player in smartphones. We are still number one, on smartphones globally and number one in smart TVs and smart speakers, and many other verticals. We spend almost 24%-25% of revenue on R&D.

What are the global trends in the supply chain, and will the impact continue?

Supply issues were there for the last two years and the reason being the COVID itself. The demand was huge, which no one anticipated and secondly, due to the disruptions of value, the value chains are disrupted. These two things made a shortage in the market. Now we see that from MediaTek’s point of view, we work very closely with our OEM partners, and, we have integrated foundries. If you see that in the last few years, MediaTek revenue has doubled from $8 billion in 2019 and $17.6 billion in 2021. Even though the shortage was there, still MediaTek revenue doubled.