Wireless Industry Analyst

[Originally for Sramana Mitra's site]

I mentioned in the last segment of this series that I was not happy with TI's wireless and mobile market strategy. Let me try to explain why.

My bearish feeling about TI’s wireless business stems from what I think has been a flawed baseband strategy. The company seems to have grossly misjudged both its primary customer and its competitive landscape. Nokia and Ericsson’s multiple vendor strategy is a stark proof that TI can no longer leverage on its strengths such as manufacturing excellence either. The company, realizing this, has recently pursued a hybrid manufacturing strategy (moving towards a fabless model for digital), but it may be late to counter aggressive competition. So, while not being able to compete on baseband with Qualcomm, Interdigital and iCera, TI is also being handed design losses at customers it would consider its childhood buddies by the likes of Broadcom.

Another fact that cannot be ignored is that all the major baseband providers either have their own application processor product or an active development program running. There is also a move towards integrated application processor plus baseband processors. This, until now, was perceived as another TI strength that is fast eroding due to smarter competition. TI’s answer which ought to have been a 3G OMAP-Vox chip is conspicuously absent from its product-line.

Thirdly, the fortunes of its connectivity solutions - WLAN, Bluetooth and GPS – are tied with the mobile chipset design wins compounding the company’s wireless woes. Though independent of the OMAP or custom chips, these are often bundled in the mobile chipsets. TI has spent substantial resources on these technologies with cutting edge R&D work. But it has made a conscious decision to focus on the mobile market though each of these connectivity solutions presents a wider prospect. This dependence on mobile not only drastically reduces their total addressable market, but also implies suboptimal utilization of the related advanced research and development work.

In summary, TI’s competitors are carving shares for themselves with niche products and the company seems all but a muted spectator. In the sequel, I will take a brief look at the financial impact of the wireless reverses for TI and the impact of its focus on the application processor segment.