MediaTek Shifts Focus to Automobiles, AI Amid Provide Glut in Smartphone Market

Taiwan’s prime chip design firm MediaTek is focusing extra assets on chips for vehicles and AI computing as its smartphone purchasers face a provide glut and inflation and macroeconomic uncertainty dent demand for shopper electronics.

“We are definitely moving our resources very, very rapidly towards the automotive and computing areas, because those areas will provide our growth in the next three to five years,” MediaTek Chief Executive Rick Tsai informed an earnings name.

“In this very demanding environment, we are not reducing people. We’re not increasing either. The critical thing is to allocate those precious resources,” he stated.

Tsai stated everybody, together with MediaTek, was dashing to say that they had been in a position to assist generative synthetic intelligence, similar to ChatGPT.

“We’re confident that we will be able to provide the capability to our customers,” Tsai stated.

MediaTek is investing closely in AI as a result of the brand new areas the corporate is specializing in are all associated to computing, Tsai stated. The improvement of autonomous automobiles, for example, requires AI chips.

While smartphone demand has remained lacklustre within the first quarter, the corporate expects indicators of restoration later this yr.

“Demand for certain consumer electronics such as smartphones is weaker than we expected,” Tsai stated. “As customers remain cautious about future demand, we expect our mobile revenue to be flattish in the second quarter and to improve in the second half.”

© Thomson Reuters 2023