Gadgetory

scarcely active a reporting live here with android authority from CS 2017 i have the pleasure today speaking with mr. Finbar Monahan who's general manager of sales for media tech morning Graham life sir good to see you and how's your CS going so far so good yeah it's like it's day three so we're in the middle of it I guess but yeah it's been a busy couple of days so far it's been a busy couple quarters for media tech yes it has yes sir let's just talk about how mediatek's doing how's company so it was a pretty good year for us in 2016 we saw very good revenue growth I think the revenue is up over about thirty percent OCR years and there's really kind of two things driving that for us one is we've seen a lot of growth in smartphones so you know even though the overall industry I think people have sort of started talking that you know there's not that much overall growth in the industry actually what we've seen is quite significant year-over-year unit growth in smartphones and so that's been a big driver of our market share and big driver of revenue I'm actually the other part of the business which is is also kind of important for CES is the home business for media tech and that's also seen some strength and TV set-top box and some of those products yeah absolutely so rich media text technology you know Taiwanese face company yep I mean the cool thing about all these sort of armed IP licensors essentially is that there's so much diversity within the marketplace you know for sure mediatek kind of took a special place because I mean Qualcomm has always kind of vibe for you know arguably the highest and and they also have a strong mid-range for then we have X else yep but Media Tech is really my opinion like their technology has graduated and improved so consistently quarter-over-quarter year-over-year how would you define the brand right now you know I use the words before like sort of budget premium yeah I mean that's kind of one way to describe it and I think but I think you kind of hit it on the head there at the start of the discussion I mean I think Media Tech has always taken a kind of a very holistic systematic approach to all of the markets we go into so you know one of the things I joke about media tech is where a software and systems company hiding as a hardware company because ultimately what we sell are the chips right but most of our engineering headcount most of our R&D effort and money probably goes into software system solutions right so we take a very systematic approach to tvs set-top boxes tablets smartphones and we really do try to build what you know some people refer to as the turnkey are that complete system solution but we think that gives us better insight into the actual end application the end user application and then you know generation after generation we can do better integration better optimization you know really trying to figure out what are the user experiences that matter and put more focus on those right yes yes and then what we also focus on though is delivering it as a reference design to our customers because at the end of the day we don't think it makes sense for like one reference design to go into every single phone from every single brand right we still want to allow enough flexibility for each brand to differentiate so you know many brands may take the same reference design from us but some of them may focus on like the camera others may focus on the display some may focus on the battery life so many focus on multiple aspects but they all want to be able to leverage that common platform that we deliver so that's where I think the value of media tech solutions come in I mean I just love listening to a talk it's very interesting I mean because your salesperson you know yeah so you're dealing these large corporate customers to me we were looking for highly customized solutions yeah and the diversity of the offerings that media tech mmm has such that you can pretty much Taylor whatever they need yeah yeah and and our customers base you know they run as you said exactly the from the tier 1 customers soul I can you know in the home and tablet space amazon has been a good customer so many years that Lily obviously they have a very unique software solution a very unique so you know what we support them with is very different maybe than what we might support a different type of customer ways actually yeah so just talking about the actual technology itself looking like the helio 630 yep talking about eight gigs around your essential and you know Decker Decker corteco or you know yeah so the helio the helio line is obviously something we focused on for the last couple of years and I think that you know back to your earlier comment that's also been part of MediaTek's deliberate strategy to you know move up here into sort of slightly higher tier to your products and and we've had you know two families the Helio X family and the Helio p family ok you know x is for extreme performance so that's where you'll see the latest and greatest technologies right so that that's where we introduced Decker core that's where we you know moved into new process technologies and then we also have the pea family and the pea family is positioned just below the x you know it probably isn't as high performance it's more about a balanced high performance and power consumption so we're really trying to deliver that you know combination experience but both have been very successful for for us I mean we've seen we've seen over the last two years probably from not being in those segments you know to probably approaching you know twenty percent of our volume is now Helio products well actually yeah and and you know some of that I think has coincided with the growth and success of many of the Chinese OEMs yeah who you know have been very good customers of media types for many years but they obviously had a lot of success domestically in China but now we start to see many of those brands really starting to come out into the global market and they tend to focus on you know slightly higher tier you know 4g smartphones which is I think we're a lot of that Helio value proposition really makes sense as you know the good performance you know at reasonably affordable prices thanks for buck exactly and that's what consumers want right now honestly you know I'm we're seeing you know the US smartphone market contracting yep I mean simply because the phones that have been released over the last 18 months Frank they're all so good yep even phones you know that were sort of considered to be flagships yeah my point is that really believe that consumers are looking for exceptional value exactly exactly it's actually global consumers you know and and there's a few trends that I think we see I mean one yes the you know I think the very interesting thing about the smartphone market these days is that the you know the overall global growth has slowed we all know that we look at the analyst report disease but if you unpack that a little bit and you look in different regions I mean India is probably going to grow by you know tens of percentage growth and will be down for a while you know I still has quite healthy growth last year other tiers are also you know the premium segment i think is probably flattened out or not yeah probably the effect you see most in the US market but you know tears below that are quite healthy as you see consumers looking for value like you said and you know one of the trends we see in the US market is a move towards more unlocked phones and a people going to you know going online to amazon.com or are going into their retail store and looking for the best phone they can buy berlin for their their particular nvidia dollars exactly and that's kind of a trend we see will happen plus i think we also now start to see china has moved into very much a replacement market so people are upgrading their phones looking for a better features more memory more camera a better display even in markets like India where you still have a large number of consumers really getting their first smartphone and that first data experience you still also have a large number of people who are also trading up in those markets so I think we'll see it kind of a shift to the you know the middle range of the market on a global basis and we think that's very much a sweet spot of where we want to be and I have to applaud you guys because a company like MediaTek you know they're putting pressure from all sides on unlike icing comments you know yeah who can remain nameless but no I mean competition is good for the market it's Christmas always get worse yeah competition is good it's good for the consumers you know we think if we can if we do our job well what we do is we enable a platform and a technology that frankly enables our customers the phone makers to be successful and ultimately delights the consumers our customers when we when the consumer wins well I mean with that I think we've almost call it a wrap very good well really appreciate a man pleasure to talk to the time came back passenger a story reporting live here from CS 2017 with mediatek thank you