In these years, people have not as good as themselves. This is not only applicable to domestic brands, but also to overseas brands.
Recently, Apple is recruiting wireless chip engineers in the Irvine area of California, involving RF, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips. It is worth noting that this is also the location of the offices of Broadcom and Skyworks, Apple's suppliers of spare parts in the above fields.
It can be seen that Apple has plans to develop its own RF, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips to replace the relevant components of Broadcom, Skyworks and Qualcomm. For now, an Apple spokesperson declined to comment on the hiring plan, while representatives for Both Broadcom and Skyworks have yet to respond formally. But after the report, Skyworks shares plunged 11%, and Broadcom and Qualcomm both fell more than 4%.
Apple is currently an important purchaser of many chip manufacturers, and Apple's every move will affect the revenue of manufacturers.
According to Bloomberg, Apple-related revenue accounts for 60% of Skyworks revenue. 20% of Broadcom's revenue comes from Apple-related businesses. The $15 billion wireless module supply agreement between Broadcom and Apple in early 2020 will expire in 2023, and now there is only one year left.
British GPU maker Imagination once nearly went bankrupt because Apple decided to develop its own GPU in 2017, and it was not until 2020 that the two sides reached a new licensing agreement.
Although many of Apple's current spare parts come from procurement, Apple has never given up self-research, in addition to the A series of bionic chips, M1, M1 Pro, M1 MAX and other processors that are currently familiar to consumers, as well as the self-developed baseband that has been boiling in previous years.
Although the current hot iPhone 12 series and iPhone 13 series are equipped with Qualcomm baseband, Apple has never given up self-developed baseband since acquiring Intel's baseband division for $1 billion.
What Apple is doing, I'm afraid, is making itself its own upstream and downstream supplier.
In addition to the offices of Broadcom and Skyworks, Irving also has Apple apple ,the NFC chip supplier for fruit mobile payments] and the University of California, Irvine, known for its RF-related engineering projects.
It is worth noting that Apple has a habit of setting up offices near suppliers, and it is likely to be the first step to replace a supplier.
Apple has reportedly set up chip offices in Portland, Oregon, near Intel, haifa and Herzliya, where AMD is located in Austin, Texas, and Orlando, Florida, where AMD is located, and Similar facilities at Infineon's headquarters in Munich, Germany.
In addition, Apple invested in dialog Semiconductor Plc, a power management chip company, in 2018, taking in hundreds of its employees in the UK and Italy.
Apple does this to enhance its supply chain security and research and development capabilities, to ensure that it can be in an advantageous position in the competition, which is particularly important in today's era of chip supply difficulties and focus on self-research level.
For consumers, in the upcoming 2022, and later in 2023, we may see more of Apple's self-developed chips and counterparts.