Market Monitor

Smartphone RF Market Monitor

By Yole Intelligence — Dec 2022

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5G to the rescue: when a weaker demand leads to a bigger market.

Wireless technology evolution in mobile handsets is pulling the market.

Year over year, OEMs are upgrading or simply adding different wireless protocols in mobile handsets, from 4G and 5G cellular technologies (including mmWave) to Wi-Fi, GNSS, and UWB. The latest addition is the non-terrestrial network support – in other words, connectivity from space. Therefore, our Smartphone RF Market Monitor aims to track the RF component market as segmented in four pieces: cellular RF front-end along with baseband and RF transceiver, connectivity, geolocation, and emerging technologies such as mmWave.

Based on technology evolution, e.g., 4G to 5G, Wi-Fi5 to Wi-Fi6, the addition of UWB, and 5G mmWave, the market grew from $18B in 2020 to over $25B in 2021. In the context of weak demand and inventory correction, this high growth slowed down throughout 2022, leading to a flattish market. 2023 is expected to be no different, therefore advanced technology penetration will be the only mechanism enabling market growth and this statement will prevail in the years to come.

Market share and near-terhttps://medias.yolegroup.com/uploads/2023/02/smartphone-rf-market-monitor-q4-2022-illu1.jpgm market dynamics

The mobile handset wireless connectivity market, including Wi-Fi, geolocation cellular RF front end and mmWave, still is led by 5 big players. Murata has and important share in all 4 segments as the company has one of the widest product portfolios, which ranges from stand-alone discrete components all the way up to highly integrated modules. Broadcom has concentrated its efforts on high-end cellular RF components and advanced Wi-Fi and GNSS SoCs, resulting in a comfortable share in the largest segment. Qorvo and Skyworks have a similar approach, deriving most of their mobile product revenues from the cellular RF front-end market segment – even though the recent move in Wi-Fi RF front-end architecture is beneficial to them. Qualcomm built its impressive growth in the RF front end space on its end-to-end approach. However, the company lost some ground in Q3 2022 following the market softness in China.

Besides market leaders, other companies are positioning from established platform providers such as Mediatek and Samsung to pure RF-play companies such as Maxscend, a Chinese fabless company which emerged over the last years. Competition with market leaders is likely to intensify in the near term as the market growth will slow down. In addition, indirect competition might arise from OEM themselves as part of their in-house chip development efforts.

mmWave as a (not yet) market up-side.

mmWave technology hit the smartphone market back in 2019, introduced by Qualcomm and featured in Samsung’s flagship S10 devices. The momentum then grew throughout 2020 and 2021 with an adoption in Apple phones, notably. Even though, the technology has a huge potential for improving wireless connectivity performances when the network is pushed into extreme conditions, think about congested areas, there has not been a larger scale adoption in 2022 as could have been expected by the industry. And we expect 2023 to be no different. Indeed, the initial pull coming from North American’s MNOs has not been extended across Europe nor Asia. The technology however found a sweet spot on FWA type use cases in multiple regions. It’s likely that MNOs will try to leverage these assets in the midterm. In addition, new 5G technology features such as NR-DC will ease the technology rollout while lowering the cost of deployment. Therefore, we anticipate an inflexion point to happen toward 2027/2028 making mmWave technology becoming a greater market opportunity for the mobile industry.

Key Features

All forecast figures are in ‘year format’ from 2018 - 2022, and ‘quarterly format’ from Q1 2020 to Q4 2024
Smartphone production forecast in Munits
Breakdown per market segment and per OEM
Breakdown per Wi-Fi air standard, MIMO order, and band support
Overall market forecast in $M segmented in Wi-Fi connectivity, cellular RF front end, 5G mmWave, geolocation, cellular Soc, and RF transceiver
Wi-Fi connectivity SoC and RF front-end market forecast in $M and Mu, at board level
Wi-Fi connectivity SoC and RF front-end components market share, at board level
Wi-Fi connectivity SoC and RF front-end market forecast in $M and Mu, at die level
Wi-Fi connectivity SoC and RF front-end components market share, at die level
Wi-Fi connectivity SoC and RF front end-components market forecast in $M and Mu, breakdown per technology platform
Wi-Fi connectivity RF front-end wafer start forecast, kw per year and kw per quarter
Main market player revenue breakdown (Murata, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Qorvo, Skyworks, Mediatek, Samsung, and Maxscend)

Product objectives

The RF front-end industry is constantly innovating to meet the requirements of smartphone OEMs. The market is evolving rapidly for each wireless communication technology, from cellular to connectivity and geolocation. This is the consequence of our ubiquitous connected world, for which smartphones are at center stage. In this boiling ecosystem, the competition is fierce and differentiation is key. Therefore, Yole Intelligence has used its expertise to build a product that enables stakeholders to keep up with changes in the market while staying abreast of the competitive landscape and technological disruption.

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