Texas Instruments CEO Richard Templeton said the silicon provider remains committed to its OMAP processor business, even as it completes its exit from the wireless baseband business.
"I think it is a highly intriguing opportunity in terms of where we are and what our opportunity is," Templeton said during a webcast of the company's investor meeting, according to Reuters.
Templeton said TI's exit from basebands was appropriate because it did not make sense for TI to compete there. He said that TI looks critically at all its business. "If they don't make sense over the long term we'll do something different," he said.
However, he said that TI doesn't "have a public or private time frame for what we're going to do with OMAP."
In the first quarter, revenue from TI's wireless business fell 43 percent to $373 million. The company said the sharp decline came as it entered the final phase of its exit from baseband products, which were less than 3 percent of the company's total sales in the quarter.
However, TI said it is expanding the reach of its wireless segment into multiple markets and experiencing a wide range of design wins. The company said overall it is seeing orders pick back up again.
Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) captured around half of all the revenue in the surging smartphone application processor market in 2011, according to a report earlier this year from research firm Strategy Analytics. The research firm noted that the smartphone application processor market boomed 70 percent to $7.9 billion in 2011. According to the report, Qualcomm, Samsung, TI, Marvell and Broadcom were the world's five largest vendors for smartphone applications processors in terms of revenue share last year. For the first time, Qualcomm, which banks on its line of Snapdragon chipsets to drive revenue growth in the application processor market, surpassed TI in terms of units sold on an annual basis, according to Strategy Analytics.
However, Qualcomm is now facing its own issues. Qualcomm said in April that its operating expenses could increase as it works to meet customer demand.
For more:
- see this Reuters article
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