by Dan Mandell | 5/3/2023

Last week, MediaTek hosted its annual Analyst Day event in Austin, TX to discuss the company’s key growth areas and strategy for the future. While we can’t share everything we learned throughout a day of detailed presentations, roundtables, and 1:1 interviews with executives, MediaTek’s plans for diversifying its business across vertical markets and geographies has already been on full public display.

The company is looking to leverage its strong competencies in connectivity, displays, low-power computing, and high-performance processing to expand beyond consumer and mobile devices into more different applications. In addition, new partnerships with ODMs and industry SMEs are poised to extend MediaTek’s reach into more types of computing solutions and customers. MediaTek is well on its way to being a more comprehensive embedded and edge processing technology provider.

MediaTek built its name in mobile devices, but the company has established large businesses in other domains including broadband, consumer IoT, telematics, and the cloud/enterprise. Looking forward, the company is focused on further entrenching its positioning in these segments, while also expanding into relatively newer domains for MediaTek with dedicated processing solutions for automotive and industrial. Both can leverage the company’s mobile phone expertise to establish more cloud connections as well as its rich multimedia support and broad hardware portfolio including applications processors, wireless connectivity, and power management components.

The new MediaTek Dimensity Auto product family is the company’s “Smart Life on Wheels” flagship automotive platform targeting smart cockpit, heterogeneous in-vehicle networking, V2X communications, and, eventually, safety-related ADAS and other systems. Power consumption is a growing consideration for automakers, as more vehicles feature an increasing array of electronics, displays (8 screens running up to 8k @ 120hz on the high end), and cameras (as many as 16 internal and external) for safety, performance, etc. Leveraging MediaTek’s 3nm advanced processing technology, the company can offer efficient, low-processing solutions for the automotive cockpit outside of the reach of most competitors. Through Auto Connect, the company is also looking to enable new telematics architectures with integrated 5G + CPU + HW acceleration for Ethernet + HSM solutions. MediaTek is also targeting advanced in-vehicle Wi-Fi 7 applications and high interoperability between Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 5G.

The company is looking to scale up through the value chain from its wide use currently in devices such as industrial tablets. The recently announced partnership with Kontron is another way that MediaTek is spreading its hardware influence into more edge AI applications in areas such as railways and factory automation. Working with Kontron and other ODMs offering higher levels of integrated hardware to OEMs and solution builders will be key for MediaTek to expand its customer base both vertically and across North America and Europe.

MediaTek has posted significant, consistent growth over the past four years (more than doubling in size from 2019 to 2022) and, while facing the same economic uncertainty as the rest of the industry, has not reduced its headcount at all or has any plans to. The company has already made significant innovations in the field of edge AI, which will permeate throughout MediaTek’s computing solutions for various end system types and fields (e.g., AI encoders saving 20-30% on bitrate thereby enabling dramatic cloud cost savings, low latency threat detection for security, etc.). Expect MediaTek to continue its aggressive expansion to diversify its business through the rest of 2023.

MediaTek will be highlighted and profiled within its upcoming IoT, Embedded & Mobile Processors market research report. View VDC’s 2023 IoT & Embedded Technology Research Outline here.