Samsung Electronics Co. has distanced itself from smartphone rival Apple Inc. as Broadcom Corp.’s largest customer.
The South Korea-based company accounted for 21.3%, or roughly $1.76 billion, of Broadcom’s $8.3 billion in sales last year, according to the company’s recently released annual report.
That’s up from 17.3% in 2012, thanks in part to Samsung’s growing leadership position in the smartphone market. The world’s largest consumer electronics maker accounted for nearly a third of the 968 million smartphone units sold in 2013, according to Stamford, Conn.-based industry tracker Gartner Inc.
Broadcom is known to have its Wi-Fi chips and combo Bluetooth/receiver chip in Samsung’s biggest-selling smartphones, including the Galaxy S2, S3 and S4 models, according to San Luis Obispo teardown specialists at ifixit.com who take apart devices to determine their contents or make repairs.
The chipmaker’s new LTE chip may also be carried in Samsung’s highly anticipated Galaxy S5 release. Speculators believe the S5 will be launched this week.
Samsung has signaled its smartphone sales could surpass 510 million units this year, boosting earnings by some $8.3 billion and further strengthening its ties to Broadcom.
Cupertino-based Apple was Broadcom’s largest customer in 2010 and 2011 before Samsung grabbed that designation in 2012. Apple remains a significant customer, accounting for 13.3% of Broadcom’s revenue, or roughly $1.1 billion.
That’s down from 14.6% last year.
Broadcom is known to have a slew of chips embedded in Apple products, including the iPhone 5S and 5C, MacBook Airs, iPods and other products.
Broadcom’s five largest customers in 2013 accounted for 48.3%, or roughly $4 billion, of annual sales.
The company is known as a fabless chipmaker because it designs chips but doesn’t operate factories, or wafer fabrication plants. Instead, it hires contractor manufacturers, typically in Asia, to produce its chips.
Its primary foundries include Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp.; United Microelectronics Corp. in Singapore and Taiwan; Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. in China; and GlobalFoundries Inc. in Singapore and Germany.
The U.S. accounted for only 3.6% of Broadcom sales last year. Its largest markets in 2013 were Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Japan at 34.5%; Hong Kong at 27.5%; and China at 23.7%.
SRCH2’s Software
SRCH2 Inc., a spinout of University of California, Irvine, is promoting that its search engine is now the fastest on Android operating systems.
The company said its software runs more than 400 times faster on local data than competitors, including the open-source Lucene search engine.
The company last year struck a licensing deal with HTC Corp. that’s expected to add millions in revenue and put the startup on the map.
Its search engine software will be embedded in several next-generation phone models slated to begin shipping this year from the Taiwan-based manufacturer.
“We’re talking millions of phones here,” Chief Executive Dev Bhatia told the Business Journal at the time.
The company’s universal search software was created in UCI labs about five years ago by computer science professor and former Google Inc. engineer Chen Li.
The software allows users to simultaneously rifle through emails, music databases, contacts and the Internet in milliseconds.
SRCH2, which has kept a low profile since its 2008 inception, is backed by Data Collective in San Francisco, Los Angeles-based TenOneTen, and Stanford University professor and tech pioneer Jeffrey Ullman.
