Thursday, 17 January 2008

Cell Base Station Chip Sales on Slow Decline

Trends in the fast-changing world of wireless services point to slowly decreasing revenues for base station chipmakers over the next several years, reports In-Stat. Providers are upgrading to the fastest cellular technology as quickly...

Trends in the fast-changing world of wireless services point to slowly decreasing revenues for base station chipmakers over the next several years, reports In-Stat.

Providers are upgrading to the fastest cellular technology as quickly as they can, but doing it while keeping price pressure on infrastructure equipment makers, the high-tech market research firm says. Further adding to price pressures are Chinese and other low-cost Asian semiconductor makers that have recently become more prominent in the worldwide semiconductor market.

"Semiconductor revenue from base stations is forecast to drop over the next few years," says Allen Nogee, In-Stat analyst.

"In these next five years, WiMAX infrastructure semiconductors will make-up a small part of this shortfall, as will other infrastructures, such as mobile TV networks, but these networks likely won't be able to totally fill the gap."

The research, "Worldwide Cellular Base Station Components Forecast" covered the worldwide market for cellular base station components. It examined some of the factors influencing both the base-station semiconductor, and the cellular power amp and power amp semiconductor markets.

Other findings from the study include:

- Base station semiconductor revenue is forecast to decrease slowly over the next five years.

- GSM semiconductor revenue remains strong, driven by capacity expansion in developing countries.

- The number of power amps shipped is forecast to decrease from 5 million in 2007 to 3 million by 2011.