How odd. Less than 24 hours ago I published a piece saying ST-Ericsson tried to sell themselves to Samsung, and Samsung said no. Now this Reuters article just hit the wire:
“STMicroelectronics and Ericsson will end their loss-making mobile chip joint venture ST-Ericsson by splitting parts of the business between them and closing the rest with the loss of about 1,600 jobs.”
Ladies and gentlemen, the one company I was betting on to give Qualcomm some competition is now officially dead. Who else is left? There’s NVIDIA, but I’m not going to take them seriously until they launch the Tegra 4i. There’s Intel, but I’m going to ignore them until a top tier phone maker launches an x86 phone. There’s Broadcom, but they’re not trying to compete in the high end, at least not yet. They recently announced that they’ve got some awesome modem technology up their sleeves, but who cares if they don’t have any customers.
As for MediaTek, they’re for budget devices that almost never leave China. And while Huawei has HiSilicon, they’ve yet to prove that it’s a competitive solution.
It’ a dark day today.
Update: Here’s the official press release on STMicroelectronics’ website.
