Exclusive: MediaTek to focus on 4G and IOT in 2018

With an aim to increase its market share in the Indian smartphone market, Taiwanese chip-maker MediaTek will be focussing on 4G phones this year.

"In 2018, we will be focusing on 4G phones in India and secondly in IOT space. We are also talking to all the key players, operators, and aggregators," Country head, Corporate Sales International, MediaTek India, Kuldeep Malik told in an exclusive interaction with GIZBOT.

He said, "We are also working on Narrowband IOT and our platform is ready but we are waiting for its deployment in India."

MediaTek and ZTE have announced the industry's first certification of NB-IoT R14 for commercial applications. These two companies jointly finished the high-speed testing of NB-IoT R14 Cat-NB2 specification with uplink/downlink data rates of over 150/100kbps as compared to 60/21kbps of R13.

For those who are not aware, CAT-NB2 is well suited for Firmware Over-The-Air (FOTA), Voice over Message, and other applications, that require high data transmission rate with minimum delay.

When asked about tying up with Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi for its latest Helio P60 processor, he replied, "We have a relationship with every brand but P60 suits more to Chinese segments."

The company has launched Helio P60 system-on-chip (SoC), the first SoC platform featuring a multi-core AI processing unit (mobile APU) and MediaTek's NeuroPilot AI technology. Its Arm Cortex A73 and A53 processor mix deliver up to a 70 percent CPU performance boost over the Helio P23 and Helio P30, in addition to a 70 percent GPU performance enhancement.

"Yes in the branding side we had some issues but we have started working on this and you will notice the changes in the coming months," he replied when asked about the competition and why people are opting for Qualcomm chipset.

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"We will have the more strategic tie-up with partners, more branding, and co-marketing strategy with the brand, we have heavily betting on P60 and so far the response has been tremendous," he added further.